


Chrysalis | Куколка

by paleogymnast



Series: Charybdis 'verse [2]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel 616, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Disabled Character, Espionage, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, POV Queer Character, Self-Discovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-11
Updated: 2015-11-11
Packaged: 2018-05-01 03:18:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 35,650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5190101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paleogymnast/pseuds/paleogymnast
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Romanova Natalia Alianovna, ex-assassin, former spy and intelligence agent, now part-time Avenger, Russian - American aristocratic socialite, business woman, occasional cat burglar. A year and a half after the fall of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Natasha is still struggling to define herself, figure out who she is, who she wants to be. But just want Natasha thinks she's starting to make new friends and carve out a niche for herself, she discovers an ally and friend may be working for Hydra and Department X. When, as a favor to Clint Barton, she agrees to help out a deep-cover S.H.I.E.L.D. field agent who needs to use Natasha's real life as her cover story, Natasha discovers terrifying connections between a Hydra plot and her carefully constructed life, and is thrust into a spy-versus-spy game of intrigue and betrayal where no one is who they seem to be and the fate of the world once again hangs in the balance. Will Natasha finally claim a life and identity that are truly her own, or will old secrets and new technology destroy the person she is becoming and doom the world along with it?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chrysalis | Куколка

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to the mods at [Romanoff Big Bang](http://romanoff-bb.livejournal.com), my awesome artist, [detective-eyes](http://detective-eyes.tumblr.com), and my awesome betas [Engel82](http://engel82.livejournal.com) and Carlos for making this possible. 
> 
> Please check out the beautiful and amazing fanart by detective-eyes [here](http://detective-eyes.tumblr.com/post/133032392346/my-art-for-paleogymnasts-fic-chrysalis-for-the)! It is also embedded in the fic!
> 
> This fic is set in the same universe as Charybdis and Other Monsters. You don't need to have to have read that story to understand this one, but it might want to read it anyway as it provides background on Clint and Phil's characters in this story. But this story is Natasha's story.
> 
> The basics of how this universe differs from the MCU (its starting point with bits and pieces borrowed from 616 and a few other places), please see the notes of the fic.
> 
> Now, for those sensitive to triggers, please consider the following warnings:
> 
> Explicit F/F sex (consensual), graphic nonsexual violence, graphic torture, dehumanization, nonconsensual body modification and medical experimentation, mild homophobia, life-threatening injuries to a major character, nondescript F/F sex in the course of espionage, strong language in English and Russian, off-screen M/M sex, mentions of past F/M sex and F/M/M sex, and references to Natasha’s training in the Red Room (if you have questions about any warnings or potential triggers, please ask).
> 
> And last but not least, I am not fluent in Russian, so while I researched extensively and with the help of google translate, Russian language websites, youtube videos, etc., I managed to put together the Russian phrases in this story, I apologize if I mangled it or got it wrong!

Chrysalis | Куколка

A dark figure ran along the rooftops silhouetted in the starlight against a moonless sky. She dodged antennae and satellite dishes, ducked under hanging laundry, and avoided loose tiles as she ran. When she came to the edge of the roof, she swung a tool off her belt and looped it around a guy-wire, sliding across the busy street to the next building over. She’d barely landed when she was off again as a sprint, tool neatly packed back into her belt.

She ran for what felt like hours, the crunch of slate and asphalt roofing tiles the only sound beyond the rush of wind in her ears. It was cold and windy, on this early November night. And at 9 pm Moscow was bathed in the darkness of true night. In reality her entire trip took only 28 minutes—she had plotted and trained and made sure to have the timing down perfectly. 28 minutes there, 25 minutes back (the different route necessitated by little annoyances like gravity, street lights, and security patrols), and 7 minutes to actually get what she came for—one hour, leaving her 15 minutes when she returned to actually accomplish all the tasks she was expected to accomplish in the total elapsed time.

By the time she tucked into a roll to soften her landing on the roof of Aleksandra Nikitichna Volkova’s house. House was a misnomer, it was more accurately a high-end apartment complex or hotel, new construction, modern in style, of which Sasha Nikitichna occupied the entire top three floors forming a labyrinthine, sprawling penthouse. Sasha’s security was excellent. Unlike many idiots out there, she did not dismiss the possibility of a rooftop assault just because there roof was 10 stories up, with a 3 meter gap to the closest building, and the exterior walls were perfectly smooth and utterly devoid of handholds. Sasha had installed alarms and motion sensors on the skylights and the alarms and deadbolts on the door to the rooftop deck, along with something that was probably a prototype forcefield. 

It would be more than enough to dissuade most would-be intruders. 

Natalia Alianovna Romanova was not most intruders.

She paused to check her pulse—75, need to slow down—checked her watch—three seconds ahead of schedule—and reached over her shoulder to draw the carbine from its padded holster. It was designed to fire any number of unusual shells and cartridges, and in this instance was outfitted to fire small electrically charged bolts, almost like an electronic tranquilizer dart. It was a little less _polite_ than an I.C.E.R. and hurt like a sonofabitch, but it also worked on anything with an electrical system, which gave it a much wider range of efficacy than I.C.E.R.s. It was silenced and propellant fired, which meant it much less susceptible to EMPs than the I.C.E.R.’s railgun technology. It was a Tony Stark special, and one he had designed for Avengers shenanigans. And while Natasha was a mostly pissed with Tony at the moment, that hadn’t stopped her from appropriating the carbine for personal use.

She checked her pulse again—58, perfect—and her watch—right on schedule—raised and aimed the carbine, made sure she had a good cheek weld on the stock and sighted in on her target. Steady. Breathe in; breathe out; hold… And fire!

The tiny bolt hit the hinge of the skylight with an anticlimactic _plink_ , and blue-tinged electrical charge arced and danced around the white metal surface for a few seconds conveniently shorting out the sensor and alarm.

Of course the Sasha had backups. If the alarm turned off or the electromagnetic lock disengaged, the backup system in the penthouse’s central control room was supposed to send an alert to the human security forces Sasha employed to monitor her home. But the backup system kept shorting out whenever the ambient temperature dropped below 3 degrees Celsius, and it was almost down to zero tonight. Sasha knew of the issue and had scheduled maintenance crews to repair and insulate the problematic sensors.

Which was why Natasha had conveniently—through a shell company in no way associated with her or any of her current or forma aliases or holdings—bribed the security company. Not to _delay_ the repairs Aleksandra Nikitichna had requested—that would be far too obvious and suspicious—but to prioritize the extensive repairs requested by another wealthy, paranoid Muscovite. If Sasha found out her repairs had been delayed and checked, all she would see would be another one percenter using bribes to jump the line. Standard operating procedure. 

Natasha counted to ten, checked her watch, and approached, careful to stick to the shadows. She flowed to her knees, reaching out to test the white metal of the skylight’s housing with her black gloved hand. It was cool to the touch and moved without protest when she lifted it a few millimeters. Better yet, there were no audible alarms, and the signal monitoring program built into her phone detected no changes in the transmissions coming to or from the penthouse.

Satisfied, she pulled the rappelling line from her belt, and went about anchoring it to the nearest secure and sturdy surface. 

This part of her plan was a little risky. The fastest way to anchor herself to the roof was to fire an anchor bolt into the roof itself, which understandably, marred the tile and was quite noticeable. If someone came up here and looked at the roofing tile on the far side of the living room skylight, they would see something had happened. Whether or not they would figure out someone had anchored a line there or suspect a break in was a different story, and even if they did, Natasha had planned carefully to ensure there was no reason they would suspect her.  
At least she didn’t have to worry about cameras. Sure, Sasha had cameras, but the cameras on the roof were motion activated and did not fare well on particularly low-light nights, like tonight, where there was no moon and the streetlight on the corner had been taken out by an unfortunate electrical malfunction Natasha had engineered two days before. 

So she lowered herself silent and stealthy, through the skylight and into the penthouse’s living room below, pausing just above the sight line of the living room cameras so she could shoot the one pointed at her with another bolt from the carbine. Checked her watch. Two minutes. Sure the guards dispatched from the central control room would eventually come and check on the camera that had suddenly gone snowy, but she’d studied the blueprints and knew the guards response time. The top floor was Sasha’s private residence. No one but Sasha and her most trusted guests even got in the elevator that reached it. There wasn’t supposed to be anything sensitive up here. No business. Just privacy. And that meant the guards were two floors below, focused on the entrance from the building proper to the main floor of the penthouse, or monitoring the public spaces on the floor below, and had to go through layers and layers of security there before they could even enter the Sasha’s residence from the elevator on the other side of the building. Factor in the night time staffing levels, the patrol routes, and that meant the fastest a guard could get eyes on the disabled camera (and the open skylight with the conspicuously dangling line) was two minutes.

115 seconds now. Natasha was down the line, slipping it out of her climbing harness, and dashing across the living room on cat’s feet, dropping to pick up the spent bolt, and staying crouched to slip past the hallway camera, pressing herself to the wall and slipping by undetected, shrouded in shadow. 

She slid down the pitch-back hallway in silence, feeling along the wall until her hand hit the lock she was looking for. 

There were no cameras here. Just a single blank screen that was actually a simple combination lock—fingerprint and digital passcode, both of which had been easy enough to acquire from Sasha; she used the same 4-digit pin for everything and had shared a cup of tea in Natasha’s hotel suite last time Sasha visited St. Petersburg—and this was where Aleksandra Nikitichna’s arrogance—and desire for privacy—shown through. She was a busy socialite and technology mogul. In her residence, her private sanctuary, she was more concerned with comfort, ease of access, and protection from prying eyes among her own people than she was worried about protections from external threats. After all, Sasha wasn’t supposed to have anything to hide. And she certainly wasn’t supposed to be hiding it in her home office. 

Natasha had the synthetic fingerprint freed from her belt and pressed to the scanner within one second. One more second had the passcode entered and the door opened with a subtle click.

Inside there were again, no cameras, so Natasha wasted no time crossing the room and rounding on the computer, flash drive already out of her pocket and plugged into the USB port. Another gift from Tony, this one taken with his notice. He’d been hacking VolkoSoft’s systems for fun for years and had a nice little worm already prepped and ready to go. Add in some algorithms to search for the right file parameters, and _if_ there was anything to find, it would automatically log in and copy itself to the drive then disengage, leaving Sasha none the wiser.

Part of her hoped she was wrong. For all Sasha’s excess and superficial shallowness, Natasha had come to think of her as a friend—a _true_ friend. She didn’t _want_ her friend to be a leftover from Department X working with Hydra, but if wishes were horses and—well she just didn’t have that kind of luck.

Sure enough, exactly 27 seconds into the one minute cycle, the drive’s light flashed from red to blue, indicating data was transferring. At 58 seconds the light flashed green, and at one minute, it disengaged. 

Natasha didn’t spare another look at her watch, her mental clock had been monitoring the seconds since she shot the living room camera. 32 seconds left. Out across the office. Slip out the door, making sure it latched and locked behind her, then a quick dash down the hallway, staying pressed to the wall, duck under the hallway camera’s field of vision then back along the path cleared by the disabled camera, and hooking the rope back through her climbing harness. It was easy and done. She just had to activate the auto ascender, lever herself back out over the lip of the skylight, and let it close. Quick. Over. Done. Two seconds to spare. 

She lay there pressed to the roof, peering in through the now-closed skylight, watching and waiting for the guards to appear.

They came, eventually, a full thirteen seconds after they should have been there, and then it was only one guard, not two. If Sasha was really her friend, Natasha would warn her to invest in more alert and obedient security staff.

The fool didn’t even look up as he checked the living room. He just homed in on the errant camera, smacked it with the open palm of his hand, spoke into his radio, hit it again, then pressed the hidden reset button. He didn’t look around, didn’t seem suspicious, just annoyed with the piece of apparently defective technology. _Imbecile_ , Natasha thought ungenerously.

She wanted to stay and watch, make sure they did not detect her intrusion (and she really wanted to see just how incompetent this clown was), but the time was ticking down. She’d stayed too long already, a full ten seconds into her 23 minute return time. So, she shimmied into a pushup position and levered herself to her feet, pausing to palm the other spent bolt and to magnetically extract the climbing anchor. Gear re-stowed, she set off along her exit vector, pushing herself to make up the 20 seconds she’d wasted marveling at Sasha’s guard’s incompetence.

Run, run, run, jump, roll… then off across the next rooftop, swinging here, leaping there, and pushing herself into a flat-out run in all the places in between. She made it to the corner where she had to time her jump with the rotation of a lighted marquis almost a full cycle ahead of schedule, and threw herself across the street at full speed, skidding as she landed on the opposite rooftop. The air burned in her lungs, and her heart rate climbed into closer to the target workout range, but she ignored it. Let the pain burn the anger from her mind, the sense of betrayal. She shouldn’t have gotten close. Shouldn’t have allowed herself to make a friend. To have… feelings. It was bad enough she was still stinging from Bruce’s not-entirely-unexpected rejection and flight, but to let herself start to _trust_ someone supposedly outside the life. Someone _normal_ , for values of normal that included ultra-wealthy business moguls who were not supposed to be spies, soldiers, or assassins. It was a rookie mistake. And Natasha had never been a rookie. She was practically _born_ a spy.

But she wasn’t a spy anymore. Couldn’t be, not with her identity—all her identities—plastered over the internet for all to see, not with her testifying in front of Congress, and socializing with other high-class wealthy aristocrats at Moscow parties and Washington museum openings and… and—

And apparently somewhere along the way a little humanity had rubbed off on her. She’d meant it when she told Steve she had to figure out who she was. And she was trying, trying to have a life, an identity, and that meant opening up to new people enough to let hairline cracks in her carefully constructed exterior show through. It meant making friends. 

It could have even meant falling in love.

But of course just because Natasha had left the life (sort of) did not mean the life or her past had left her. It didn’t mean she could wipe out all the red in her ledger, wipe the blood from her hands…

_It didn’t mean she could escape her past._

Apparently Aleksandra Nikitichna Volkova was a part of that past, whether Natasha had realized it or not. The blue light on the flash drive said so.

She was breathing hard and her legs were tingling when she finally dropped from the drain pipe to the window ledge outside her eleventh floor suite’s palatial bathroom. She lifted the sash, and eeled inside, closing it behind her with an audible thud.

The noise snapped her out of the haze she’d slipped into, focused her. She was pretty sure no one was watching—or listening—to her bathroom, but a little betrayal was not reason to let her guard down. Especially since the thudding window did _not_ match with the prerecorded soundtrack she had left playing in her absence.

On the recording, Natasha was bustling around and humming to herself. 

She held her breath, waited, but there was no knock on the door, no creak of floorboards or response from the concierge or maid or anyone else. It was just Natasha alone, listening to a recording of herself echo off the marble walls and floor of a hotel bathroom the size of Clint’s old Brooklyn apartment. She checked her watch even with the graceless entrance, she was still a full minute ahead of schedule despite her late departure. She was _damn_ lucky to have not screwed up her timing or gotten caught the way she’d been rushing. 

Inwardly kicking herself, she deftly divested herself of her harness, belt, and other gear, stowing it in the bag she’d left stashed inside the under-sink cabinet farthest from the door and closest to the window.

She stripped, unwrapped her hair, and stepped into the shower, doing her best to melt, or maybe boil, the slippery feeling of guilt and betrayal from her body. Her skin, already pinked first from the cold and then from the exertion, quickly took on the rosy glow of good exfoliants and very hot water.

Natalia Alianovna, mysterious and alluring ex-spy, pseudo-aristocrat, business woman, and burgeoning socialite might be assumed to take a full hour and a quarter to get prepped and ready, but thankfully Natasha Romanoff, actual spy and active Avenger did not. She was showered and dry within 6 minutes, dry shampoo and scented styling spray taking the place of a too-time-consuming wash and dry. Four minutes for toiletries and teeth brushing. Three minutes to slip on panties, stockings, a concealed under-dress thigh holster, and shimmy into her sparkling, deep red backless halter dress with its plunging neckline and flowing, full length skirt. And that left her with a full three minutes to apply makeup and twist her hair up into a respectable up do. Years of practice and necessity, shedding skins and identities left and right, needing to morph, disappear, or attract attention at a moment’s notice, had honed her timing down to an art. What took others hours, took her minutes. 

She had just slipped into her heels and slid in her second earing and was applying mascara when she heard the click of the door lock in the outer suite disengaging. The recording automatically shut off. 

Footsteps. A knock at the door. The concierge’s voice came through, telling her in Russian that her car was ready. 

She took another five seconds to inspect herself in the mirror, twisting and turning to make sure she hadn’t missed any scrapes or inexplicable rooftop tar streaks. Satisfied, she opened drawer in front of the sink and pulled the Glock 26 out of the speed safe and secured it in its holster. She took the ceramic knife in its sheath from the same safe and slipped it into her black-diamond crusted clutch, and strode confidently from the room, making small talk with the concierge as she left.

Time to put on her game face. Natalia Alianovna should be delighted to see her good friend Aleksandra Nikitichna at the charity ball they were both attending. She should look the part.

If Natasha was seething with betrayal and unvented rage, well… there was no reason for Sasha Nikitichna to know.

~~~

“Natasha,” Aleksandra Nikitichna exclaimed with a genuine smile, taking Natasha’s gloved hand between hers and brushing kisses against both her cheeks in greeting. “What a pleasure to see you. I am so happy you could come.”

“I wouldn’t miss it,” Natasha answered, stepping back and letting her hand drop slowly from Sasha’s, careful to school her features. She should be genuinely thrilled to be in Sasha’s company. Up until three days ago, Sasha’s flirtations would have been desired, wanted, _thrilling_ even. Natasha would have been excited, flirting back, tiptoeing around their attraction, or maybe not tiptoeing, by now she would have been actively maneuvering her way through the flirtation, and actively trying to get Sasha into her bed. The Natasha of three days ago would have felt a thrilling _flip_ down low in her stomach, a rush of heat in her groin, her pulse would have quickened, the flush in her cheeks would have been genuine. Because that was what had been happening—she had felt _genuine_ attraction to Sasha. She, _Natasha_ , not some cover she was playing, not some persona she had adopted, was falling for Sasha, making a personal connection, considering adding Sasha to the microscopic circle of people Natasha actually trusted—

For the record, there were only _four_ , and until she learned of Phil’s resurrection, there had been only three. Two of them were considered legally dead, at least in most circles, and a third was still technically a most-wanted fugitive in most circles, and in the rest, he was believed to also be dead. Steve had been added to the list as a result of his behavior during the fall of S.H.I.E.L.D., and despite his grounded, down-to-earth personality and seemingly good intentions, Sam still hadn’t made it in that far yet. But she had been thinking of adding Sasha to that list. Taking a chance. Maybe seeing if, in a world where Natasha wasn’t a spy, love was something other than a fairytale for children.

But then, three days ago, while she and Sasha had been lounging in the private sunroom of Natasha’s hotel, well into a bottle of good Russian vodka, telling each other stories about their most embarrassing and awkward sexual encounters, when Sasha had done it. It was the tiniest gesture, a flick of the wrist paired with a nod, subtle laugh that gave Sasha a split second of extra time within which to respond to Natasha’s comment. Natasha couldn’t even remember what she had said or asked—was it a question? A joke? Something else? All she knew was that _gesture_ was trademark Red Room. Natasha had learned the same trick and deployed it—subconsciously more often than not—countless times since she first _graduated_ and was sent out into the world. It was a placeholder, something to do to cover the split-second of time it took to come up with a plausible lie. 

Which meant Sasha had trained in the Red Room and whatever she’d said after that gesture had been a lie. Natasha didn’t even remember what it was, she was so thrown by the unexpected familiarity, her memory had actually blanked on Sasha’s exact words. Natasha couldn’t help wondering who Sasha was, who she _really_ was. Had she been there at the same time as Natasha? She didn’t recall knowing anyone named Aleksandra Nikitichna Volkova, but had Sasha been known by another name? Was Sasha Nikitichna just another cover? Or had she been a real woman whose life Sasha had taken over? Or had Sasha been there at a different time? Maybe she had been a few years ahead or behind Natasha. Maybe she’d been trained in a different Department X facility. Natasha couldn’t know for sure. But she did know there was a connection between Sasha and the Red Room and now, there were files on her personal computer with Hydra encryption. 

She’d known for a while that Department X and Hydra had been working together. The Winter Soldier was one such joint endeavor, and he dated back to World War II, but this was the first evidence of an ongoing connection since the fall of S.H.I.E.L.D. 

Natasha just wished the source hadn’t been someone she’d started to let in. 

“There’s someone I would like you to meet,” Sasha continued, rousing Natasha from her musings. “May I introduce my new assistant, Olga Alexeevna Tsvetkova.” Sasha stepped to the side and motioned a young woman forward. The woman was _young_ , maybe no more than 22, probably college-aged. Her bearing was shy, almost meek. She was dressed in a designer evening gown and held a diamond encrusted clutch in her right hand, so, superficially, she fit in with the rest of the guests at the ball. But her demeanor and body language was all wrong. She stood with her hands clasped in front of her, eyes downcast.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Natasha said in Russian and then English.

The latter caused Olga Alexeevna to stir, and she smiled up at Natasha. “Hi,” she said in faintly accented English.

Natasha held out her hand and Olga shook it.

Sasha looked back and forth between the two women a little uncertainly before she smiled, a hint of fakeness creeping in around the edges. “Of course you would take to each other. Olya here,” she continued, her name lacking the affection the diminutive for “Olga” usually carried with it, “was raised mostly in America, so you two probably have a lot in common. Olya is my new assistant and she is helping me with that project I mentioned to you the other night.”

Natasha blanked. _Project?_ She did remember Sasha mentioning some sort of joint venture for which she thought Natasha would be a perfect fit, but her mind was very… _fuzzy_ on the details, every ounce of her brainpower having been coopted into analyzing the threat level presented once she realized Sasha was apparently both Department X _and_ Hydra.

Luckily for Natasha, Sasha just kept on talking. She was so excited and _animated_ about the project, Natasha felt her fear and distrust eroding again, being replaced by that fond affection that had been growing within her before that stupid gesture broke the bubble. Natasha fought with herself, struggling to maintain the cold, critical mood she’d had upon arrival.

Sasha explained the project was a joint venture between VolkoSoft and an American biotech firm. They had approached Sasha for assistance in programming chips for biomedical applications. Now there were other companies involved, and it was a big _fiasco_ , but also a wonderful opportunity that Sasha thought would lead to VolkoSoft eventually acquiring the American firm and expanding its market share. She thought Natasha’s field experience with a variety of “spy gadgets” along with her American citizenship and understanding of American politics and business will be a big help toward smoothing things over with the American investors and project manager. 

Natasha was so rattled by her discoveries about Sasha’s Hydra and her suspicions about the Red Room, she managed to get through the conversation on autopilot. Only she did manage to notice Olya stiffen every time the joint venture’s “goals,” were mentioned.

“It sounds lovely, Sasha,” Natasha said cutting her off, “but I am not sure it is a good fit for me. I am not a traditional business woman as you know, and these days I am not the most popular person in the United States.” She smiled, squeezed Sasha’s hand, and nodded at Olya. 

“Don’t say ‘no,’ we need you,” Sasha insisted.

“I’m just not sure—” Natasha tried to dissuade her.

“Just think about it.” Sasha pressed something into her hand, what appeared to be a business card, and leaned in to kiss Natasha’s cheek. “We need you.”

Natasha managed to suppress a shudder and took her leave. 

She lasted another 30 minutes at the party, circulating, doing the socialite thing, before she couldn’t take it anymore.

Increasingly rattled by her latest encounter, Natasha returns to her hotel. She didn’t sleep or settle in, just went straight to packing. She could catch the train to St. Petersburg first thing in the morning. She could rest then, letting the rattle of the cars and the hubbub of daily life lull her into a near-meditative state. The last thing she did before leaving was take a closer look at the card Sasha had slipped her. It was silver and shiny, and bore two stylized logos:

_Project Chrysalis: VolkoSoft and Xenogen working together for a brighter future!_

She dropped the card on the bathroom counter and rushed to the toilet to puke. Everything she’d tried to eat or drink at the party came back up again. There was something insidiously familiar about the _tone_ of that slogan. It smacked of eugenics and genocide and oppression. And the longer Natasha looked at it, the more unsettled she became. 

Playing a hunch, she hauled out her frequency scanner and ran it over the card. The scanner blinked green.

Natasha’s stomach turned again. The card was _transmitting_. She’d be impressed at how miniaturized and flawlessly hidden the tech was if she wasn’t so horrified that it was there at all. Well _that_ was new. She’d need to get this to Clint at S.H.I.E.L.D. to see what they made of it. Call Cap and Sam (and hell Stark too) and warn them of the danger. Make sure they didn’t get slipped any business cards cum listening device/GPS tracker. You had to hand it to Hydra (she was absolutely sure it was Hydra tech), they sure were inventive.

Resolved to this new reality, she found some foil—left over from yesterday’s room service—and carefully wrapped the card in it. Hopefully whoever was listening on the other end would just think the card was muffled, shoved in a suitcase or maybe put in a tin. With that done, she zipped her suitcase closed and headed down to the lobby to catch a cab.

~~~

Natasha had just made it back to her room (safe, familiar, hers) when Clint called.

“So, how’re _you_ doing?” Clint’s voice came through the cell receiver muffled and vaguely tinny. 

But to Natasha it was a welcome balm, a reminder, a connection to a part of her past long lost, but still dear to her. The way the world had changed, the way she had changed, sometimes her years with S.H.I.E.L.D. felt as distant and dream-like as the Red Room. Undeniable for their impact on her being and the literal, physical scars she had acquired while in their service, but so far removed from her day-to-day life it might have well have happened to a different person. 

“Oh, you know, same old same old. Meeting people, lying through my teeth, charming them into showing all their cards, and them none the wiser—”

Clint laughed.

“I’m practicing my Russian a lot, hadn’t realized, but some of the finer points of class dialect and slang were getting kind of rusty,” she continued, holding the phone to her ear with one hand and unzipping her suitcase with the other. “Of course, at this rate, my English will get rusty. I’ll slip, start talking with an accent.”

“You never had an accent,” Clint said fondly.

“True,” Natasha paused, inspecting the dress she had pulled out of her garment bag and checking it for wrinkles. Satisfied, she moved to hang it in her closet. “But I could definitely fake one if I wanted.” She smiled, “What you think? Maybe I sound like strong, Russian lady, da?” 

Clint’s laughter turned into full on braying that usually signaled he wasn’t hearing himself or didn’t care.

“You’re hilarious,” he deadpanned when the laughing stopped. “You could sell tickets.”

Nat smiled as she turned back to her bed and continued to sort the contents of her suitcase into its respective homes—closet, hamper, to-be-dry-cleaned. It was so normal, so mundane, it belied the life she’d known and lead for so long.

“How’re you?” she asked instead, worry brewing over how slightly off Clint sounded. She’d thought it was the connection, Clint calling from scrambled secure line from wherever the fuck S.H.I.E.L.D. had holed up these days, call probably bouncing of a dozen satellites before it reached her, but now she wasn’t sure. His laugh... “How’s the rehab going?”

There was a pause and she could almost hear Clint thinking, weighing his options, deciding how to answer. That was the problem with this song and dance... no matter how much their loves had changed, Nat still knew Clint and Clint still knew Nat. They knew each other’s weak spots and hang-ups and tactics. Clint could hear what she was really trying to ask even if she was too polite and evasive to ask it.

The silence stretched long enough Natasha almost checked her phone to see if the call had dropped, but she knew better, could still hear Clint’s breathing over the line. 

“Do I really sound that bad?” he asked, voice somewhere between desperate and defeated.

Nat’s heart clenched in her chest, a little stutter-step accompanied by a hitch in her breathing. She wasn’t all that worried before, but now she was. “You don’t sound bad,” she reassured, “just—different. And now I’m worried. Did you get the new hearing aids okay? Maria assured me they were tracker-free and Stark has no clue—”

“They’re great. It’s just. Remember when I told you about the explosion outside of Tashkent?” The question was rhetorical. Clint didn’t give her time to even mumble an affirmative, he just power ahead. “Well, like I said, I fractured my left temporal bone. My hearing on that side is gone. There’s no getting it back. The aid sends sounds from my left ear to my right and amplifies them, so I still have directional awareness, but... That’s kinda trippy. I’m still not really comfortable with it in combat. But the hearing aid works fine and it connects with my phone so we can have this lovely chat. Sorry, though. I guess I actually sound Deaf now.”

“Hey, Clint, that’s not what I meant.” Nat gave out a frustrated sigh and dropped onto the end of the bed, weary already. “I just—there are a lot of things that could be putting a tone in your voice and you’re not here for me to see you. I don’t even know where you are. So cut me some slack. I’m not trying to be a dick, just trying to sort things out, figure out how you’re really doing, help, if I can.”

“Well, the additional hearing loss sucks, but my vibrational awareness is now off the charts to the point where it’s distracting in day-to-day life. I’m back on the range and training, my aim’s still better than anyone else on the damn planet, but I’ve got some chronic pain issues with my clavicle and the low pressure system that has been trapped on top of is for the last three weeks is really starting to get on my nerves. And yes, then there’s the bit where my husband is now an amputee, and while I am wholeheartedly thankful to the agent who saved his life for doing so, there’s just the whole little issue of the language barrier that suddenly popped up between us. Our resident tech genius, Fitz, hooked him up with this cool neural interfaced prosthetic, but Phil—the dexterity isn’t there yet, so…”

Nat’s stomach dropped and she felt herself flinch under the sting of Clint’s words. She hasn’t even thought of that. Why hadn’t she thought of that? And how horrible must it be for Phil and Clint and she wasn’t even thee with them. It was unfair and horrible, and there was nothing she could do. “Shit, I’m so, so sorry,” she murmured.

She could hear the rustling of fabric that signaled Clint giving a one-shouldered shrug. 

“Phil’s having phantom pain, a lot of it, and he keeps trying to sign, but you know, there’s no hand there, and I just... I don’t know. One-handed signing works fine, it’s just Phil keeps forgetting and it throws him off. Then Phil gets grouchy.”

“And grouchy Phil is no one’s favorite person. Did he threaten to sit on someone and watch ‘Super Nanny’? I heard he did that to Stark once.”

“No,” Clint snorted, “but he threatened to delete all my cached copies of ‘Dog Cop’ episodes the other day, when I tried to remind him to sign one-handed.”

“Ouch,” Natasha said, laughing finally.

“So, I actually didn’t call just to chat. We—Phil and I and S.H.I.E.L.D.—but especially _I_ need your help. There’s this agent. She’s great. Good friend. Best of the best. It’s looking like we’re going to need to send her undercover, medium to long term. And we could use you to go in with her, as her handler.”

“How?” Natasha stammered, because hell that was _not_ what she expected. “Clint, did you miss the part where my covert status is blown. Everyone knows my face, my name—”

“That’s actually what we’re counting on. We need your profile as a budding socialite, business woman, philanthropist and you connection to Sasha Volkova. We’re hoping you can give our agent the cover she needs.”

At the mention of Sasha’s name, Natasha’s stomach flipped again, threatening to empty its contents like it had last night. “What—”

“It’s too sensitive, even for this secure line. Has to be face-to-face. But there’s a Quinjet waiting for you five minutes away, and I promise there’s a file on the plane. Give you the bare-bones background. The stuff we can risk letting off base.”

“So I’m supposed to drop everything—” she protested, even as she began reversing her packing process, taking the clothes back off the hanger, along with some new ones, and shoving them back into her suitcase.

“Like you’d say no,” Clint scoffed. “Dress warm. We’ve got an agent posing as a limo driver—Mack, you remember him?”

“Uh-huh,” Natasha concurred. 

“Meet him in the lobby in 10 minutes. You’re wheels up in 20. Oh, and dress warm!”

“Bye Clint,” she sighed even as the call disconnected. 

Great, just _great_. She hadn’t even had time to wrap her head around the mess that was her former _relationship_ to Sasha, and now this. Well, there was plenty of time to start sifting through and decrypting the data she’d snagged from Sasha’s computer on her way… wherever it was S.H.I.E.L.D. was holed up these days.

~~~

Clint wasn’t kidding when he said the file was bare bones. There was a brief bio of an agent named Skye aka Daisy Johnson, S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, no photo, and her current assignment to project Caterpillar—a project intended to gather and train powered individuals, particularly members of her species, Inhumans. Most of the info was redacted. There was also a slim bio on Sasha and another on Wolfgang Stentz, aka Mr. Fenret, who was apparently an Austrian or German national with known Hydra ties, who was posing as a Frenchman and working in the management at VolkoSoft, as Vice President of Acquisitions. Natasha’s mind flashed back to her conversation with Sasha, and her stomach twisted a little more. Then there were mentions of disappearances of Inhumans and suspected Hydra involvement, and that was about it.

She spent the rest of the flight poring over the data on the hard drive, kicking herself each time a new Hydra connection was revealed. Sasha had Hydra connections, all right. She was doing business with a half-dozen of their captive corporations and seemed to know exactly who Mr. Fenret was, in fact, he appeared to _answer_ to her on a Hydra-basis.

Disgusted, Natasha tried again to nap, but found her mind wandering, unable to settle down. How could she have _missed_ it? And if she’d missed this, what good could she possibly be for Clint and Phil’s agent?

~~~

Natasha wasn’t sure what she was expecting, but an underground base in the middle of the Gobi desert wasn’t it.

Five minutes after she arrived, Clint was there, hugging her, and signing his way through an introduction of the agent Natasha was supposed to help out.  
Natasha’s first impression of Skye was that she was too young. Natasha was well aware of the irony, even without Clint humorously pointing it out. Yes, she had been a child spy and assassin. Yes, Natasha was herself still quite young, still in her early 30s, less than 4 years older than Skye herself. But Skye still had that air of innocence and youth about her that Natasha was loathe to disrupt.

“She’s not that young and definitely not innocent,” Clint said softly to Natasha as she watched Skye interacting with her friends. There was a somber mood around the base that Natasha understood was the lingering reminder of Dr. Simmons’ disappearance and absence, but off-duty, hanging out with Dr. Fitz and Mack playing Xbox games, Skye seemed carefree, happy, normal. A civilian’s civilian and the last sort of person you’d want to take undercover. “Just _watch_ ,” Clint insisted.

So Natasha watched and tried to keep an open mind. It didn’t take long. Maybe a half hour after she started observing Skye, a report came in and Skye was summoned to Coulson’s office. The moment the messenger spoke Skye’s name, her voice, personality, carriage, and posture changed. In a split second, she transformed from a carefree young adult into a highly competent asset. 

Intrigued, Natasha wound up following her—into the briefing, down to the gym, to the lab—everywhere Skye went, Natasha followed, her opinion changing and reshaping with each new data point. 

When Clint found her again, hours later, Natasha was hiding out on the shooting range, watching as Skye set and took each shot. Skye was _mesmerizing_ as she demonstrated her skill in sniping. 

“I didn’t know she was a sniper,” Natasha murmured, voice distant and in awe.

“I told you you’d like her,” Clint quipped, his voice a little too quiet. “Phil always said you collected snipers like some people collect stamps.”

“You make it sound so… mundane. And it’s hardly collecting.”

“What about me?” Clint asked. “Or Barnes—”

“I hardly _collected_ the Winter Soldier. He more tried to kill me several times, and then I helped _Rogers_ find him. Steve collected him, not me,” she protested.

“I happen to know there were others,” Clint teased, his voice sing-songing to match his smile.

Natasha just shoved at his shoulder playfully and returned to watching Skye shoot. She was practiced, methodical, calm. Her breathing was controlled, and Natasha could tell Skye had a heart rate monitor and kept her pulse slow and steady. It was impressive work, especially given the distance of some of the targets on S.H.I.E.l.D.’s huge underground range. 

When she was done with long-range drills, Skye reconfigured the bay for moving target practice with a handgun. Run after run, she hit target after target, never hitting a “civilian” or non-hostile no matter where it popped up.

“You’ll be good for her,” Clint said, his voice coming out a little too quiet and slightly off-pitch.

She frowned at him, sad. “Still having trouble—” She broke off, feeling like an ass. Who was she to criticize Clint? Was she accusing him of not _covering_ enough, not sounding “normal.”

“Hey, hey,” he said, steady hands settling around hers and squeezing reassuringly.

Natasha felt the impatient animal that seemed to be leaping against her rib cage settle down just slightly, just enough to listen.

“It’s not the same. I’m not the same, I mean. I have more trouble matching pitch and intonation and volume control than I did before, before the explosion,” he said, swallowing, eyes darting away. Even almost a year and a half since Clint had almost died in his flight from Afghanistan during the fall of the old S.H.I.E.L.D., Natasha knew it was still hard for him to talk about. “Yeah, my hearing’s a lot worse. There’s only so much StarkTech and the stuff Fitz cooks up can do. It would probably suck if I was still primarily a deep-cover operative. Thanks to you,” he grinned, “my cover’s kind of permanently blown on that front, so yeah, not really something I am worried about.”

“Are you okay, though?” Natasha asked, kicking herself internally for getting so wrapped up in her own problems that she felt like she’d more or less neglected both of her oldest friends.

“Not okay, but, getting there? Phil’s got phantom pain and issues with the neural interface on his prosthetics. Like I said, he’s still, uh, getting _used to_ signing one-handed, and I’m getting over not being able to pass for Hearing. It sucks sometimes, but hey, we’re both _not_ dead, even though we should be, so I really can’t complain.” He nudged Natasha’s shoulder with his own.

“Come on,” he continued, pointing toward the range where Skye was now packing away her weapons. “Phil wants us in his office for a briefing.”

“You’re going to tell me how I’m supposed to pull off being the handler for an undercover sniper whose day job is apparently organizing a team of powered people when my identity is about the farthest thing from covert you can get?”

“You’ll see,” Clint said cryptically, rolling to his feet and pulling Natasha up with him.

~~~

The briefing was familiar, like so many Natasha had sat through over the years at S.H.I.E.L.D., but yet also alien, unknown. Clint was there, taciturn and stoic, taking it all in. Phil was there too, leading the briefing, something Natasha thought she’d never see again, the pain of his death still fresh in her mind. There was a S.H.I.E.L.D. logo on the wall, and if Natasha closed her eyes, she was back at the Triskelion or the Hub or the Helicarrier, or any of a dozen or other S.H.I.E.L.D. bases where she’d sat through countless briefings and meetings over the years.

Only her eyes _weren’t_ closed, and the familiarities stopped there. Instead of cold, clinical walls and a modern, utilitarian aesthetic of the S.H.I.E.L.D bases of old, they were sitting in Phil’s office, with aged brick giving way to simulated windows that felt warm and homey despite being buried somewhere deep beneath the Gobi Desert. And this was the _Director’s_ office, because S.H.I.E.L.D. no longer operated in plain sight out of a cylindrical monument of glass and Fury was no longer the Director, that job fell to Phil. Phil who was _alive_ and relaxed in a way Natasha had never seen before, but also tired, changed. It wasn’t just the missing hand—although to Natasha, it was a little jarring when Phil started the presentation and she realized he wasn’t wearing his prosthesis—he looked tired, worn. The lines around his eyes were a little deeper, his eyes themselves a little more haunted. It was clear now that Phil had changed; no matter how miraculous his resurrection or recovery, he hadn’t emerged from death unscathed.

The _vibe_ of the briefing was totally different too. Phil was sitting _on_ the edge of his desk. Clint and Skye were both leaning against the wall, and Bobbi was sitting backwards on a chair, straddling its back, her still-braced knee extended. Two years ago, if anyone had shown up at a S.H.I.E.L.D. briefing and made themselves _that_ comfortable, they would have at least gotten a reprimand from Assistant Director Hill, if nothing else. Natasha or Clint _might_ have gotten away with it, but Natasha doubted even they could have been so casual. 

Natasha took a seat and crossed her legs casually feeling oddly formal and out-of-place. She looked at the wall of screens, the brick, Phil, the screens, and back to Phil again. “So,” she began smoothing he hands over her skirt. “What is it you want me to do?”

Phil gestured at the screen, bringing up an image of Sasha looking over her shoulder while walking down a Moscow street. It was a surveillance photo shot with a telephoto lens. Natasha recognized the outfit Sasha was wearing and the bag she was carrying. If she wasn’t mistaken, that image was taken just a few weeks before. Sasha had been on her way to meet Natasha for lunch. Nat hadn’t had the slightest idea Sasha was being followed. (Then again, maybe she had been willfully blind, trying to see Sasha as a _normal_ person, removed from the spy-versus-spy intelligence merry-go-round that had been Natasha’s life as far back as her memory stretched.) “Meet Aleksandra Nikitichna Volkova, President and CEO of VolkoSoft,” Phil began as a slide show began on the big screen. “Socialite, billionaire, philanthropist, computer engineer. Many have called her Russia’s female Tony Stark. Only she seems to be more mass-market, less big flying suit.” 

Natasha’s eyes flicked over towards Clint looking for an indication if he’d shared what she’d learned, but he just met her eyes and gave a tiny shake of his head, pointing his eyes back towards Phil.

“Ms. Volkova has a good rep. She’s a bit of a hard partier,” the screen flicked through a dozen different images of Sasha at a dozen different parties and charity balls, “but is generally respected. You may ask what Russia’s more philanthropic female Tony Stark has to do with a S.H.I.E.L.D operation, and that’s where it gets interesting. We received a tip about eighteen to twenty months ago that Ms. Volkova had ties with Hydra. At first we assumed it was because VolkoSoft had a contract with S.H.I.E.L.D., and most of the VolkoSoft hardware and software purchased through that contract wound up in what turned out to be Hydra facilities. Suspicious, yes, but hardly definitive, especially given the connection between Hydra and S.H.I.E.L.D. But then, six months ago this happened.”

Natasha couldn’t quite suppress the snort that bubbled up at that comparison. She could imagine how Stark _and_ Sasha would react to that comparison. Neither one would be particularly impressed. Stark would be insulted thinking of Sasha as a wanna-be and a hack, while Sasha would think Stark beneath her notice, a nouveau-riche showman with poor taste and bad tact who didn’t belong in polite society, let alone in circles of old money and nobility— But just as soon as the thought completed, Natasha’s mood soured as the familiar burn of betrayal and self-recrimination flared anew. Sasha was _not_ her friend. Natasha schooled her expression and returned her attention to Phil’s presentation.

The images on the screen changed again, now showing satellite images of some sort of spill at sea, charred buildings, image after image of what looked like ash-like shells or cocoons, the rubble of a collapsed fort, and then images, dossier photos of a dozens of mostly young men and women. “I believe Clint briefed you about the Kree Diviner and Inhumans?”

Natasha nodded. “But uh, just bare bones.” He’d explained a while back how Phil had lost his hand and they’d had another chat on the way between the range and the Phil’s office, but that was about it.

“Well, while I was busy doing my best left-handed Luke Skywalker impression. The Inhumans’ leader, Jiaying, was doing her best Emperor Palpatine impression—”

This time Skye was the one who laughed. “I think it was more of a Darth Vader, honestly, what with the force choking, trying to kill her own daughter bit.” The words were humorous and light hearted, but there was something haunted and bitter lurking under the surface of her tone that made Natasha think she was missing something. 

“You’re laughing about it?” Phil asked, surprised.

“So are you,” Skye replied, and an unspoken understanding passing between them.

Phil smiled and turned back to Natasha, “I digress. Long story short, thanks to Hydra’s influence the once benign, caring leader of the Inhumans revealed her plan to kill all the humans and force all potential Inhumans to go through terrigenesis. She’d done a pretty good job of convincing her people S.H.I.E.L.D. actively wanted to hunt them down and kill them, so the fallout when they found out she had gone genocidal on them was pretty severe. Many of them fled. Others’ locations were unknown to anyone but Jiaying, so when she died, they were left out in the cold. To complicate matters, Jiaying almost succeeded in her plan, and in the process a full crate of terrigen crystals was dumped into the ocean, where eventually they made their way into the sea life and wound up in fish oil supplements. Within a month, new Inhumans began emerging. So far, we haven’t had mass deaths from human exposure to the same supplements, so we’re considering ourselves lucky. We’re not sure if the seawater or high pressures at the ocean floor managed to do what hundreds of years of Inhuman refinement could not and separated out the element in terrigen crystals or if there’s still an anvil out there waiting to drop. 

“You’re probably wondering why we haven’t figured that out yet and why it isn’t our top priority,” Phil added, his expression apologetic. “It _was_ our top priority and it _still would be_ if something else hadn’t happened.” Phil brought up another image—a world map with a scattering of pins dropped on it, marking some sort of pattern or occurrence. At first glance the meaning wasn’t obvious; some of the pins marked large cities, but others were in obscure locations.

Natasha studied the map for a few moments and raised her eyebrow, prompting Phil to continue. 

About three weeks after the first emergences occurred, right about the time we had figured out what had happened and that the strange chatter and reports we were seeing were related to newly minted Inhumans, we were contacted by two preexisting Inhumans, people we knew from our interactions with Jiaying. Both were reporting missing persons—one reported the disappearance of a known Inhuman, an individual experienced with her powers who had successfully lived under the radar for years and hadn’t been to Jiaying’s stronghold in almost as long. The other reported losing contact with a young potential Inhuman, a teenager who had never undergone terrigenesis, but who was a known descendant and had a cousin and grandmother who had.”

Phil pointed to two of the pins on the map. “These were their last known locations,” he pointed to two of the pins on the map. “At first, we thought it might be a coincidence. No one knew when the potential went missing, or if he even was missing, and the other person was accusing S.H.I.E.L.D. of kidnapping, killing, or otherwise detaining the active Inhuman. It took about a week to satisfy them that wasn’t the case, and then we moved on to searching the usual suspects—other intelligence agencies, the Anti-S.H.I.E.L.D. taskforce, Hydra, Hydra associates, but we didn’t find anything. No one knew anything… and then the reports started piling up.” He gestured at a series of dots on the map. “These five reports came in from other active Inhumans over the course of a week; only one of the missing persons was an Inhuman, the other four were potentials, descendants. These three,” he pointed at a cluster of dots, “all came in on the same day. An inhuman couple and their 12-year-old-child living in rural Oregon suddenly stopped responding to their friends emails. This was a contact of Agent Skye’s, who went dark without warning, just dropped off the grid in Jakarta. We had a lull of about a week and then this,” he pointed to a dot somewhere in the vicinity of Seattle, “a S.H.I.E.L.D. team went to investigate reports that could have been an Inhuman emergence only to find no sign of the target and proof the emergence had occurred.”

Phil smiled at Natasha, it was that smile he used when he was exhilarated by his job, but anything but happy. “The strange thing was, of all the emergences we’d tracked, this was the least obvious, the hardest to find. No one should have _known_ what was going on to intercede. But they did. And over the course of the next six weeks, _this_ happened.”

The dots on the map blinked off then on again in a progression until the map was even more filled than before.

“147 disappearances. Of them only 12 were of known Inhumans and only 5 were new emergences. The remaining 130 were descendants. Regular humans with the potential to be Inhumans. Now it’s possible some of them may have been exposed to the terrigen that leaked into the ecosystem after our confrontation with Jiaying, but we don’t know for sure. What we do know is all 147 disappeared within the first two and a half months after that confrontation. Since then, 30 more have gone missing, again, mostly descendants, genetic status unknown.”

“177 missing?” Natasha asked. 

Phil nodded. 

She wasn’t sure how big the Inhuman population was, especially if you considered potentials. How much alien heritage did someone need to have to be a potential? Would they know? Did _S.H.I.E.L.D._ know if they were really potential Inhumans?

“About two months ago, we got a lead, three of the missing had been contacted by representatives of Xenogen, a biotech company based in Seattle that specializes in genetic engineering and cybernetics.” Phil pointed at the map again and zoomed in on Seattle. “More interestingly the Seattle–Tacoma Metropolitan area has a higher concentration of disappearances than any other place on the globe, despite having—from what we can tell—about an average population of Inhumans and potential Inhumans. We started digging into Xenogen trying to find anything suspicious, anything that might shed light on the situation.”

The screen changed again, bringing up images of bills of lading, invoices, spreadsheets. “We found something—shipments, expenditures that all seem to be going into Seattle, but don’t show up on any official manifests and don’t tie to any public projects. We dug a little father and we found this,” Phil paused to bring up a series of invoices and emails, half of which were in Russian. 

Natasha squinted at the small print, something familiar twigging at the back of her memory and sending a shiver down her spine.

“These are documents related to a proposed joint venture between Xenogen and VolkoSoft,” Phil finished.

The familiarity snapped into place and settled in Natasha’s stomach like a rock. _Oh yeah_ , there was that familiar feeling of doom and foreboding once again. It was the same punch in the gut she’d felt when she’d seen Sasha make that gesture, or when the file search on Sasha’s computer had returned files tagged with known Hydra encryption protocols.

“The thing is,” Phil continued, “while the emails suggest this is a proposed joint venture, the money trail paints a different picture. Whatever the joint venture is, it’s already well underway, and it started, about a month before we learned of the first disappearance. What’s more—” the screen changed again, “it appears VolkoSoft and Xenogen were using an intermediary and the intermediary, is a known Hydra operative, Wolfgang Stentz.”

She’d been thinking about Stentz since Clint had mentioned him. And now the thought turned into revulsion. Natasha knew _of_ Stentz, but she’d never met him, make that never _knowingly_ met him, because the image that was displayed on the screen was indeed one of Sasha’s vice presidents. She hadn’t realized “Fenret” was supposed to be French. He sure wasn’t trying too hard. Her recollection of him was of a seemingly innocuous, if a bit gruff and jaded, German manager who lurked around the periphery of Sasha’s life, popping up on several occasions with documents for Sasha to sign, an urgent phone call here, a hastily scheduled meeting there…

“Stentz is currently serving as a vice president for VolkoSoft, although we’re not entirely sure what VolkoSoft’s role is in the situation or if they are aware of what Xenogen is doing, since aside from the monetary connections and the mysterious joint venture, VolkoSoft has no connections to any of the disappeared Inhumans. Or rather they _had_ no connections until very recently.”

The screen changed again and now Natasha was treated to a series of images of people she knew much more closely.

“Meet Olga Alexeevna Tsvetkova, better known as Olya. Russian-born, and mostly American-raised. She is, as far as we know, a potential Inhuman, her mother is a close friend of Jiaying who was _not_ in on the whole plot to destroy humanity and her father was another Inhuman. He died when Olya was a baby—it was the last days of the U.S.S.R. and from what we can tell, he was either hunted down by David Whitehall, aka Werner Reinhardt, or targeted by Department X operatives—”

“Maybe both,” Natasha murmured.

“Hmm, it’s possible,” Phil agreed, not sounding surprised at Natasha’s suggestion. “We just know he was targeted for his abilities and he’s been dead most of Olya’s life, which is how she came to spend a big chunk of her upbringing stateside. Now, her mother is an also an Inhuman and is American. She’s asked that we keep her out of this as much as possible, and after conducting a thorough background investigation to confirm she’s not involved, we agreed. Just know that her mother raised Olya and is American, although she moved to Australia several years ago and has been helping out with a small Inhuman community there. Olya’s mother had not spoken to her daughter in several months, in part because of the upheaval caused by Jiaying’s attack on S.H.I.E.L.D. As a result, we don’t know quite when Olya went missing. But three months ago, her mother tried to contact her and couldn’t find her anywhere. Two weeks ago, Olya popped up in Russia, working as—”

“Aleksandra Nikitichna Volkova’s personal assistant,” Natasha answered.

“Ah, so you have met,” Phil said.

“Yes,” Natasha answered with a little shake of her head that explained this wasn’t the time.

So Phil kept on talking, “Long story short. We don’t know if Olya is still a potential, or if she went through terrigenesis. It could be that was _why_ she was missing. One thing for sure is that her personality has changed markedly when compared to before the disappearance.” Phil illustrated of video—a vibrant, laughing, intelligent, devious college student, expressive with great eye contact, had somehow turned into the shy, awkward, ghost with perpetually downcast eyes who flinched far too much when Sasha talked about the new Joint Venture.

“Given the connections between VolkoSoft and Xenogen, we think Olya is in danger. We also think she may be our best link to finding out what has been happening to Inhumans. Who’s taking them. What they’re doing.” Phil paused and sat back on his desk. “Look Nat, we don’t know if Sasha’s involved in this or not. We don’t know what she knows, but we know you know her and seem to have a connection there that we can exploit.”

“You know she asked me to contribute to her joint venture,” Natasha surmised.

Phil nodded. “The idea is for you to go to her, tell her you’ve decided to take her up on her offer. Skye will be your new assistant. Skye can use that position to get close to Olya, see if she can find out what happened to Olya, how she got there. Together you can both work to figure out what is happening to the Inhumans.”

“But why send in Skye at all? No offense,” Natasha added. “If my real-life connections work so well as a foot in the door, why not just ask me to get close to Sasha, figure out what she’s doing—”

Bobbi, Phil, and Clint’s eyebrows went up, and Natasha kicked herself for using the familiar, affectionate name for Sasha that would only be used by a friend. They knew what that meant.

“Because I’m Inhuman. The reason I lead a team of people with powers is because I have them,” Skye said, speaking up again.

Natasha looked at her, and realized the whole room was… _vibrating_.

“Thank you for the demonstration,” Phil said, sincerely. “Skye has abilities that make her uniquely suited to this situation. She is Inhuman, she understand terrigenesis. She is much more likely to be able to identify other Inhumans and if Olya has been traumatized, she’s the most likely to be able to get through to her. Skye is also… uniquely skilled at containing situations that get out of hand.”

“I take it you do more than vibrate?” Natasha asked.

Skye nodded.

“But sending Skye in is a risk. If VolkoSoft is actively involved, it could put her at risk of falling into the same trap as the missing Inhumans. We don’t know how they’re identifying people. For all we know, they may have a file on her, or might be able to identify her as Inhuman on sight. Her cover could be blown before this gets off the ground.”

“My Russian is also still not 100% and I haven’t had that many long-term deep-cover assignments.”

Phil smiled wryly, “In fact, I think your last deep-cover assignment was infiltrating S.H.I.E.L.D. for the Rising Tide, wasn’t it?”

Skye just laughed.

“So, we need your help,” Phil concluded.

“In that case,” Natasha began, feeling very weary, “there’s something I have to tell you.” And she did. She told about the gesture and the Red Room, the hard drive with the Hydra files, seeing Mr. Fenret’s relationship to Sasha, the bugged business card, Olya’s strange behavior. Pretty much everything except her own trampled feelings and personal betrayal. Sasha was a friend. Nothing more. Only Phil and Clint (and maybe Bobbi) knew differently.

~~~

It took a couple of weeks to get their cover into place. Natasha contacted Sasha and said she’d had a change of heart, she _would_ be willing to join in that venture after all, she just needed a short time to wrap up some business in Asia.

When their strategy was sound and Skye’s Russian was good enough that she could eavesdrop effectively, they returned to St. Petersburg, to await meeting with Sasha. Natasha and Skye struck up a tentative working relationship.  
Natasha was floored by how much Skye reminded her of herself, and yet how different she was, mostly self-taught someone who threw herself into spycraft and international intrigue willingly in the hopes of finding out about her past, only to discover it was a labyrinthine morass involving S.H.I.E.L.D., Hydra, and blue-skinned aliens.

They pooled intel and managed to figure out Project Chrysalis involve something S.H.I.E.L.D. knew of as the chrysalis chip. They hadn’t yet discovered what it does, just that several scientists and engineers who wound up in the wind after first project Deathlock was shut down and others who wound up on the run after Hydra’s powered-people experimentation labs in China and Sokovia were closed, had been connected to it. 

“Fitz assumes it’s some sort of biotech device designed to modify or control people,” Skye concluded.

They decided on the details of Skye’s cover: she would be Russian-American, with an American father and upbringing to explain her accented Russian and American mannerisms, while also giving her a point of commonality with Olya. 

Natasha just hoped it worked. That the timing wasn’t too obvious, her change of heart suspicious. She’d been pretty emphatic when she turned Sasha’ down. Then again, from Sasha’s point of view, aside from their interaction at the charity ball, Natasha had been very interested in the project, thrilled to be working with Sasha. Now, if Natasha could cultivate the continued intimacy she would need to convince Sasha while also keeping Skye from falling into the same trap as all the disappeared Inhumans, everything might work out.

~~~

“So, what about you? What do you do in your free time?” Skye asked, flopping down on the bed with a little bounce. They were due to meet Sasha and Olya to travel to Seattle tomorrow.

“Who me?” Natasha asked, with a coy smile and a scoff of mock shock.

“Yeah you,” Skye looked her up and down, assessing. “Three weeks and all we’ve done is train. I want to get to know _you._ Are you going to tell me you’re yet another spy, or ex spy, who’s all work and no play?”

Natasha’s smile morphed into a genuine grin. “You’d be right about that.”

“Really?” Skye leaned back on her elbows, expression turning to an almost-frown. “‘Cause I kinda hoped maybe the whole coming clean, letting the whole world know who you are, telling Congress to kiss your ass thing came with fringe benefits. That and the Avengers thing is a part-time gig right? The whole super-secret Theta Protocol, you’re obviously not on all the time if you have time to babysit me.”

“Is that what you think this is, babysitting?” Natasha asked, a flicker of annoyance almost cracking her mild bemusement.

“Ah, so it’s _not_ babysitting, or not _just_ babysitting,” Skye rattled on, ankles crossed, feet swinging, she looked positively giddy now. “So A.C. must still think I’m capable, trainable, that’s good to know,” she murmured half to herself, “that means you’re more of a mentor, legitimate handler. If we’re going to be working together for some unknown amount of time, I think we should get to know each other. So what do you do? I mean A.C. had Clint, even when he was all terrified and lonely and broody, May’s got Andrew, and it’s starting to look like she’s really _got_ Andrew again, if you know what I mean. Bobbi and Lance are an on-again, off-again, all over the place thing. And even Mack had someone before hydra killed them, so what’s your deal?”

“Sorry,” Natasha said, spreading her hands. _Nothing to see here._ “Like you said, all work and—”

“Bullshit,” Skye said, breaking out into an absolute grin.

“Oh, so I suppose you have a life outside of S.H.I.E.L.D.?” Natasha asked.

Skye’s smile faltered, but she didn’t seem upset. Instead, her brow furrowed and she turned introspective. “Okay, that’s fair, fair. Let’s see, the last guy I actually dated turned out to be a sadistic, murderous, Hydra sociopath who kidnapped me on more than one occasion and whose behavior led to me being transformed against my will into an Inhuman. The other person I thought I could have had something with would have been an office romance and kind of turned into a murderous, xenophobe who at least for a time advocated for the termination of anyone with powers and anyone not human, and then even if that hadn’t gone sideways it would have meant sticking my foot in the middle of two different love triangles, and then they went and got sucked into an alien artifact, so things got kind of extra-complicated. I try to have friends within the Inhuman community, but half of them don’t trust me because I’m S.H.I.E.L.D. and they blame me for getting their sanctuary destroyed and the other half don’t trust me because my mother was a crazy murderous sociopath who was _actually_ responsible for getting our sanctuary destroyed and almost got us all killed, and my one real friend among them is still recovering from injuries sustained at the hands of Hydra. I consider A.C. a friend, but he’s kind of busy with the whole lost hand/S.H.I.E.L.D. director/avoiding mutiny side of things. I hack in my spare time, for fun, but sadly that often winds up turning into work. So, yeah, I may not succeed in having a life outside of work, but I do try.” Skye’s feet were swinging again. “So how ‘bout you?”

 _Huh_. That was more words than Skye had said since they’d been introduced. More than that, it was frank, honest, and compelling. Natasha had picked up on the not-so-subtle deployment of the pronoun game, of course, but from what she could tell, even that was calculated, intended to be revealing, not deceptive. Skye played to her sense of professionalism by proffering a tit for tat and implying she knew more about Natasha than she was saying, while also having a legitimate reason to want to get to know more about her new handler. Skye _was_ good, if still untrained. 

And maybe, maybe she was also a friend, a kindred spirit. Someone other than Phil or Clint to whom Natasha could open up. After all, Phil seemed particularly attached, and Clint cared enough to have brought in Natasha… not _just_ because it was important to Phil or to the mission, as Natasha had originally assumed, but because he _cared_ about this girl—woman. The only reason Natasha had to freeze her out or hold back would be jealousy, and it wasn’t _Skye’s_ fault Natasha was out of the game, or _mostly_ out of the game. Natasha had been the one to press the button. She had made the choice to reveal all of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s secrets and her own along with them.

~~~

Seattle in October was overcast, mild, and drizzly. Natasha had been there enough times to not be surprised at the rain (or rather the _nature_ of the rain), but Skye seemed genuinely bewildered that the rain wasn’t torrential or at least heavy.

“You’re a hacker,” Natasha mused. “Seattle is a tech city, you never crashed any conferences here? Or just came to hang out for the ambiance?”

“I came to a protest here once, but I was only here for 2 days and spent most of the time in my van, coding and blogging. People on the ground were feeding me video and I was posting, it, hacking websites, and monitoring police activity. Two of the friends I came with got arrested and the rest of us followed plans and booked out.” Skye looked out the window of the Town Car Natasha had hired, and stared, seemingly fascinated. “I never really slowed down enough to look. I couldn’t have told you what time of year it was, forget what the weather was like.” She turned to Natasha, “It’s really pretty. That looks cool, she pointed at the elevated light rail. Bet you have a great view.”

Natasha followed Sky’s pointing. “It’s scenic and clean, but slow,” she said thinking back to the last time she’d been in Seattle. “It didn’t go all the way to the airport when I took it. It was still under construction, you had to catch a shuttle bus.” She blinked her eyes against the rush of sense memory. She and Clint posing as a young hipster couple, on the trail of a Dutch biochemist and a Russian arms dealer. It was a mid-length op and they were in place, under cover for over a month, had time to experience the city more like locals. Took light rail, busses, even a couple of ferries as part of their cover, Clint hypervigilant and twitching the whole way, Natasha trying to act as a buffer, watching Clint’s back and his more deaf side in the hope of giving him enough of a bubble of safe space that he’d be able to come down, breathe. They’d ridden the light rail together, Clint’s body rigid and strung taught where he was pressed against her in the crowded crush of stinky bodies. She _missed_ him so much. Missed _them_ , missed Phil, missed S.H.I.E.L.D. and the comfort of familiarity her life had grown into over the years. 

Natasha cast a glance at the tinted divider that separated them from the driver. “If it fit with our profile, I would take you on it,” she said in Russian. 

Skye frowned for a moment, obviously struggling to parse the language she was still learning, bit after a moment she seemed to get it. “Really?” she asked.

“Da,” Natasha answered. 

The drive was uneventful. The driver took the scenic route, state routes, not the freeway, over the 1st Avenue South Bridge and up through SoDo, past the Starbucks world headquarters, past the port and the ridiculous stalled tunnel digging fiasco, past the stadiums, and up on the Alaskan Way Viaduct, or what was left of it, at least. It had been longer the last time she’d been on it. 

The whole way, Skye sat pressed to the window, almost oohing and aahing at the sites. Natasha had given her the driver’s side seat for exactly that reason. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d gotten to share something new with someone she cared about—or could care about. Her mind shied away from the implications, especially since Sasha’s betrayal was still so fresh, but even pushing that flare of hurt-fear-want down deep inside, it didn’t dampen the genuine joy of her mood. 

Skye was gawking at the sunset over the Ferris wheel when the car swooped down off the Viaduct on Seneca and headed up first to their hotel.

“Here we are,” Natasha said, as the car completed the turn in the Four Seasons’ cul-de-sac and glided to a halt. She felt a surge of pride as Skye composed herself into her cover persona as she stepped out of the vehicle. 

Skye played the part of the attentive assistant, following Natasha from a deferential distance, handbag clutched securely never leaving her side even as the driver unloaded the vehicle onto a rolling cart provided by the bellhop. 

Natasha checked them in—one suite under her proper Russian name and Skye’s truth-fueled alias, Margaritka Kelvinovna Ivonova—(based off her given name, “Daisy,” and her father’s name). and took the elevator to their corner suite—not on the top floor, but one floor down, giving them a little more protection from aerial attacks. 

Skye held her character perfectly, opening doors, tipping the bellhop, all the while remaining a consummate professional, but a little more wide-eyed and naïve than Skye herself was. 

When the bellhop had gone, generous tip in hand, and the door was securely locked, deadbolted, and privacy bar flipped, Skye raised one questioning eyebrow at Natasha.

Nat shook her head, a tiny nod meaning “wait,” and retrieved the scanner from her carry-on, prodding it as if it were some sort of cell phone. She wandered around the anteroom, bathroom, and bedroom, moving the “phone” from her ear to her hand as if looking for a signal. Satisfied there were no listening devices or broadcasting bugs, she returned the scanner to her bag, and said, “we’re clean,” as she stepped up behind Skye.

“It really is beautiful,” Skye said, looking out over the water. “It’s kinda gray, but not like LA and the light’s different. Different from New York too,” she mused. 

Natasha looked out at the sound trying to put herself in Skye’s shoes, see what she was seeing. It was mesmerizing the way the light played through the clouds, the faint hints of color coming from where the Ferris wheel had turned on its lights, the sky not yet dark enough to fully appreciate them.

“I stayed here once, with Clint and Phil,” Natasha murmured, “not on a job,” she added, “but... _after_.”

That wasn’t the last time she was in Seattle, but the time before. She and Clint were tracking one of the more terrifying individuals who had wound up on the index. She couldn’t quite remember who—well she _could_ , but she didn’t particularly want to try. She and Clint had been separated, their comms had been knocked out, and they’d both completely lost touch with Phil... for over 48 hours. Clint’s hearing aids had been disabled, he’d fallen down a staircase and had gotten shot, a graze that furrowed deep into his hip. He’d gotten some stupid infection (which with Clint, pretty much meant it was a day ending in “y”) and they’d had to drag him to the hospital. Afterwards Phil had checked them all in at the Four Seasons. One room for the three of them. They didn’t even step outside for four days. 

“You were _with_ them,” Skye observed.

“Yes,” Natasha answered. 

“Do you—did they—” she searched for words. “Did they leave you?” she asked.

“We were never...” Natasha stopped because that was misleading. She was under no obligation to share her personal life or her history with Skye, but she found she wanted to, needed for Skye to know her, understand where she was coming from as a person, know the truth and experience that was behind her lessons and mentorship. 

“We were never in a committed relationship together,” she started again. “Clint and Phil were—are—together, and I was their friend. Sometimes they wanted or needed more and sometimes I joined them.”

“So...” Skye began obviously working her way up to something. “You’ve had sex with Clint and Phil?”

Natasha smiled a little at the memory. Clint’s cock buried in her cunt, Phil’s dick snug in her ass, kissing them both as Clint twisted her nipples... Another time another night, her strap-on buried in Phil as he fucked Clint. There was a level of comfort and intimacy in her memories that she missed. 

“They fucked me, I fucked them, everyone made love to each other.”

“So, do you want to go back? Do you miss them?” Skye tried again. 

“Like a limb... but, after everything Phil went through, I think I would be asking a little too much of them. They need time and space to heal _together_ , why?”

Skye shrugged. “I don’t know.”

_She really did._

“Sometimes they both look lonely? Like they’re missing someone or something. I’ve heard them talk about you, and I think they miss you, but they understand.” For a moment it looked like she was going to leave it at that. “Sometimes I think they’re a little lost.”

“How about you?” Natasha asked, genuinely curious. 

“How about me what?” Skye asked. A pause. Then, “Oh!” She stammered. “Clint looks at me sometimes like he thinks he wants me, but A.C.,” she shook her head. “He’s more of a father figure to me. It would be too weird,” she admitted. “Maybe someday they’ll want and need you again.”

“Hmm,” was the only sound Natasha made.

~~~

Over the next several weeks Natasha maintained the image of being the curious new investor, sharing her anecdotes on the differences between life in America and business in the “wild west” of Russia. She kept up her feigned friendship Sasha, which seemed to have devolved into a near-endless string of working lunches, flirtation, and fairly intimate dinners. Natasha had gotten very good at surreptitiously examining any paper documents, Sasha had with her, sneaking peeks of schedules, plans, contracts, itineraries, and invoices whenever Sasha got up to go to the bathroom, or left the documents unattended. They were all documents Natasha arguably had _reason_ to see, given her cover, but she did not want to see how Sasha would react if her extracurricular perusing was discovered.

She took pictures of everything she got her hands on, using a tiny camera carefully hidden in her watch that stored the images and transmitted them automatically to S.H.I.E.L.D. when plugged into an encrypted network like the one Natasha and Skye had set up in their hotel suite. She’d told Fitz the camera was “genius,” when he’d presented it to her. Clint had laughed, shared a glance with Fitz, and pointed out that it was, “Way more practical than a massively uncomfortable contact lens that took pictures, but made you blind in one eye.” They’d both laughed hysterically after that, cementing the opinion that Natasha just didn’t want to know whatever had prompted that strange comparison.

Natasha had managed to clone Sasha’s phone before they’d left St. Petersburg, so all that data was being transmitted to S.H.I.E.L.D. without need for further intervention.

There was no outward sign Sasha had caught on, although her advances were becoming more blatantly sexual. One night she said, “You should come back to my room with me, Natasha, really we would have great fun.”

“I don’t want to leave—”

“You worry too much about your little assistant Margaretka. You forget she and Olya both lived in America for a long time. They will not starve if left to fend for themselves. Besides,” Sasha whispered, wrapping her hand around Natasha’s wrist and leaning in close to whisper in her ear, “I think your little mouse is attracted to mine. Perhaps we should give them some space and see what romance blooms, no?” She nuzzled Natasha’s neck before pulling away.

“I try not to mix business with pleasure,” Natasha countered with a sad smile, “It’s why I was so… reluctant to take you up on this opportunity.”

Sasha batted her eyelids and looked down at Natasha through fluttering eyelashes. “Then I will just have to persuade you that this rule is meant to be broken.” Her thumb stroked across Skye’s wrist, and Skye felt her heart leap in her throat.

This wasn’t the first time she’d seduced a mark. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d ever fucked a mark, either. It was often much easier to assassinate someone if you were intimately close to them and their guard was down. She’d been trained since childhood, and she was _good_ at it. But none of those other missions, other marks, had ever turned her stomach like this. Because she’d never _cared_ about them. This time, Natasha had violated her own rule about mixing business and pleasure before she even knew what she was getting into. She’d fallen for Sasha before she’d discovered the truth, and the thought of sleeping with her now, now that she understood much better what sort of monster Sasha might be, now that her heart had been betrayed, made her sick. 

_In the old days, Natasha had never let anyone in. Never had feelings for anyone, not like that, not even Clint and Phil. She’d never gotten hurt because no one ever touched her._

She missed being a spy sometimes; things were so much easier before S.H.I.E.L.D. fell.

She pushed off Sasha’s advances for another night, but didn’t know how much longer she could manage. She also didn’t think about how it wasn’t just her _past_ feelings for Sasha that were making the situation so uncomfortable.

Skye’s investigation was also underway. She seemed to be succeeding in befriending Olya, who was still as woman of few words, and seemingly terrified or oblivious whenever Skye pressed into her background. But her attempts to hack into Sasha’s network were not bearing the fruit they had hoped.

“I don’t get it,” Skye said to Natasha one night, when they were secure in their suite, the room once again swept for bugs and with signal jammers turned on. “Did you know Sasha already had an office here while we were still in Russia?”

“No,” Natasha admitted. “She talked about this joint venture as something more in the planning stages. We figured out that wasn’t true before we left S.H.I.E.L.D., but I didn’t know anything about an office.”

“Well when we first arrived Olya was staying with Sasha at a hotel. She mentioned it. But after the third day, she mentioned Sasha’s house. When we’ve been working on schedules and planning and all our assistant stuff that doesn’t have to do with fetching coffee and designer handbags, I’ve been accompanying Olya back to this house. It’s a high-rise condo, and it’s got an extensive office. It was already set up—I mean there’s dust on the surfaces. The furniture isn’t new. Hadn’t been moved. It looks like Sasha and maybe Olya had been here _before_. Whatever Sasha’s doing, she’s been coming here for a while,” Skye explained. “So I hacked her network the first day. I mean the security on her office is a joke. And you can see the data yourself. We’ve got more evidence of Sasha’s ties to Hydra and Mr. Fenret, sorry Wolfgang Stentz, and of her dealings with Xenogen. There’s some data on the chrysalis chip, some of which suggests they already have a working prototype, but there’s no indication of how that connects to the missing Inhumans. Or _if_ it even does. I still can’t find anything on the payment and delivery discrepancies going to Xenogen, but I can’t find any connections between Sasha and the discrepancies or any clue where the Inhumans may have been taken. We’re missing something. I just don’t know what. I think I’ve got to try something new.”

Natasha really should have worried what Skye meant by “something new.”

~~~

“I found one of the missing Inhumans today,” Skye announced late the next night.

“What?” Natasha asked.

“I tried something new, asked Olya if I could accompany her on her errands. Told her you’d tasked me with getting a better assessment on the Joint Venture, on the real nuts and bolts of it, so you could better evaluate your investment. I hinted you might be willing to make a bigger _commitment_ depending on what we found.”

Natasha rolled her eyes at Skye, not relishing the implications.

“Olya ran it by Mr. Fenret. He seemed _pleased_ like creepy pleased. She took me to a converted warehouse in South Lake Union. Half of it is new office, half of it still looks industrial. Tan, the Inhuman, was there. Only he _wasn’t_ there. I mean, I knew the guy in Afterlife. We talked. He had a bubbly personality. This guy, it was definitely Tan, but—” she shivered. “He didn’t recognize me. He hardly even acknowledged Olya. She asked for a manifest, and he showed it to her, but it was like he was… reprogrammed.”

“You mean like indoctrination or Loki and a scepter using an infinity stone?”

“Both? Neither? He just seemed almost robotic. Hardly talked. I was worried my cover was blown, but he just did not know me. Then we went inside. I—I couldn’t see much. It was dark, except for the stairwell was bright, but all the doors leading off it were locked. But I saw the manifest, and you know the missing shipments? I think that’s where they are. The same components, parts, even personnel who seem to be missing, I think they’re all there. But it’s not under the name of either VolkoSoft or Xenogen. Everything was stamped ‘Chrysalis.’ Some in English, some in Russian.”

“What else is there?” Natasha demanded, sensing hesitance.

“A lab—clean room for working with chips and semi-conductors, but there’s also what looked like a secure biohazard facility, and a medical suite. We walked by them on our way to the clean room where Olya was asked to inspect something, a prototype, I think. It was some kind of chip but tiny, and her hands were shaking like she was terrified. She looked at it under a magnifier, and handed it back said it looked good. The doctor or whomever she talked to went and made a call after that, and then we left. But on the way out, one of the stairwell doors opened, and I saw—it was just a glimpse, but I saw bodies, in restraints. I pretended I didn’t notice, but—”

“That’s where she’s keeping the Inhumans.”

Skye nodded, her fists clenched. “I think so.”

“You said you saw a _doctor_ with the chip?”

“That’s how Olya introduced him. We shook hands. His lab coat was embroidered with an M.D., we can run a search on his name, but yeah, he was definitely a doctor, and not a Ph.D., either,” Skye added. “What do you think it means?”

“I think _Chrysalis_ is a bit more than a nascent joint venture, and I think we need to know exactly what the chrysalis chip does.” Natasha said and headed for the door.

“What are you doing?” Skye asked.

“Finding out,” Natasha answered as she left, unable to look Skye in the eye.

~~~

“Natalia Alianovna, what a pleasure,” Sasha said by way of greeting opening the door as Natasha arrived at her condo, unannounced.

“The pleasure is mine, Aleksandra Nikitichna,” Natasha murmured, taking Sasha’s hand and kissing it.

Sasha smiled and led Natasha into the condo. The entry way was large and opened into a loft-style room with an open plan and a full wall of windows overlooking the sound. Sasha led Natasha to an intimate leather loveseat at the center of a seating area in front of the windows. 

“My assistant went on a little field trip with yours today,” Natasha began.

“I heard,” Sasha said, sounding pleased.

“I was quite _intrigued_ by what I heard. It seems that this, Chrysalis project, this joint venture, is much farther along than you had said.” 

“It is a… delicate matter, one that took many years of trial and error before we had a proof of concept, even more before we had a fully functional prototype. Many months have passed between each generation of prototype and the … beta testing for this sort of thing can be very challenging.”

“I know you are working with a biotechnology company, have you been running into problems with the FDA?” Natasha asked, insinuating she could help, if that was the case.” 

“Ah, good question, and one I will appreciate your help with navigating when we get to the point, but no, our testing thus far has not been… within the _purview_ of the FDA. But it has been sensitive and problematic nonetheless.”

“It sounds like you’ve been working on this for years,” Natasha observed, leaning closer. 

“Ah, it has, you see, Dr. Gunderson, he is my counterpart at Xenogen, and their Deputy Medical Director, well he and I have been friends for many years. We had the idea at a conference almost a decade ago, and ever since, we have been taking steps to make our vision a reality, but it was only within the last six months that our plans were solidified enough that we could go to our respective companies. Lucky for us, I was able to recruit Mr. Fenret to handle many of the _acquisitions_ ,” Sasha smiled, and Natasha’s stomach lurched at the implication, “that made getting to this point possible. He and I pooled our intel and with some additional tips from Dr. Gunderson, we… found what we needed,” her fingers were trailing up Natasha’s wrist now.

“I worked for a long time to save the world. To _protect it_ ,” Natasha chose her words carefully, “from threats. But my current circumstances have not allowed me the same opportunity to make a difference. I _want_ that. I think your project, Chrysalis, might be the perfect way to do that, but I want, no I need, to know what it really is, what it _does_? Tell me about it?” she pleaded.

Sasha leaned back and unbuttoned two buttons of her blouse, shaking her hair out, loose, over her shoulders. “So, are you ready now? To make a commitment? To, mix business and pleasure?” She practically purred.

“I am. I,” she took a shuddering breath that was only half-faked, “I commit.”

Sasha leaned in, capturing her mouth in a kiss, one hand gripping tight to Natasha’s hair as the other swept down to cup Natasha’s breast. She leaned them back, shifting on the loveseat to give them as much room as she could, so Natasha was lying near flat, with Sasha over her. Her hands already moving under Natasha’s skirt to caress her more intimately.

~~~

“I got the plans to the Chrysalis chip,” Natasha announced the next morning upon entering their suite and ensuring the frequency jammers were still turned on.

Skye didn’t look up from the office area where she’d set up her computers. “Manuel Gunderson, M.D., is a not-so-ex Hydra doctor who studied under Werner Reinhart and has almost as much of a penchant for vivisection as Reinhart did,” Skye said, deadpan.

Natasha’s stomach twisted a little more. They’d gotten one step closer to unlocking the puzzle, but at what cost?

“I’m going to take a shower.”

~~~

Bits and pieces of days spent poring over the schematics didn’t seem to help though. They’d heard the rumors the chip was used to control people. Natasha had assumed it was Hydra’s next attempt at reconstructing Loki’s scepter, and Sasha was, for some reason, using it to influence Inhumans. They’d also discussed the possibility that the chip was a ruse, and some sort of straight up drug or psychological reprogramming was controlling the Inhumans.

Skye ran her hands over the schematics spread out on the table and resumed pacing. “I wi—” she started to say, but Natasha cut her off.

“Fitz isn’t here, and neither is Dr. Simmons.”

Skye just cast her an annoyed glare and kept on pacing. She cupped her elbow in one hand, her right thumb tapping steadily against her lips. “Maybe we’re looking at this wrong.”

“What?” Natasha asked with dry sarcasm, “You think Sasha’s _not_ hunting, capturing, and reprogramming Inhumans.”

“No,” Skye said, pausing it last, her eyes flicking towards the exits, the light fixtures, any place that could conceal a threat or opportunity. It didn’t attend that they’d swept the suit for bugs over and over again. Natasha couldn’t quite shake the feeling they were being watched, so it wasn’t really a surprise Skye couldn’t either. “I think that’s _exactly_ what she’s doing. Reprogramming them. _Literally_.”

“What?” Asked Natasha. Confusion aside, she couldn’t quite shake the chill that ran down her spine and settled, icy in her stomach.

“We’ve been thinking she was somehow involved with _figuratively_ reprogramming them or killing them outright. When you figured out shebang connections to the Red Room and Hydra, that made sense. Brainwashing, conditioning. But what is she? I mean what is Sasha good at? She’s a programmer and hardware designer. She’s a technology mogul with years and years of experience and billions of dollars of infrastructure at her disposal. And she teamed up with a biotech company. 

“When I look at those schematics, they look an awful lot like more common chip architecture only the components and peripherals and connections don’t make any sense.”

Natasha leaned forward, taking a closer look. She could see it now. This didn’t look like a weapon on its own, but maybe it was a _part_ of a weapon. A component to be loaded into a ... She swallowed around the sudden urge to gag.

“This is a chip designed to be loaded into the Human brain and central nervous system, or at least the _Inhuman_ brain. I think she’s been putting her skills together with those of her long-time Hydra friends and is literally reprogramming the Inhumans she’s captured, writing her own operating system to control them and their powers, turning them into weapons... Infallible weapons who have no choice or free will, who implement her every command, because that’s what they’re programmed to do.”

“Is that possible?” Natasha asked at last, feeling the undeniable weight of certainty settling into her gut. 

“Hydra and Department X have been playing with biotech implants for decades. The Winter Soldier’s arm, for example. Project Deathlock and Project Centipede. Tony Stark’s arc reactor. Hell, Phil’s hand.” Skye shrugged and spread her hands.

“But that’s not... hacking someone’s brain,” Natasha protested. 

“We’ve had true AI for a while now. Again, you know Tony Stark and J.A.R.V.I.S. and whatever his new AI is called. And Ultron. You’ve fought with Vision.”

“Vision has a fucking magical alien rock stuck in his head,” Natasha protested. But it was only a token protest, and they both knew it. “None of that involves hardware and software interfacing with actual living tissue. No one has actually reprogrammed a brain with programing code.”

“Maybe not before, but I think Sasha has. Without Fitz or Jemma or even Bobbi, I can’t be 100% sure, but that’s what this looks like. And that’s what makes sense. It accounts for cause and effect and Sasha’s known strengths and weaknesses. It fits with what we’re seeing.” Skye shook her head and crossed back to the table falling, almost crumpling into her seat. “Look, believe me or not, but I know I right. When I saw Tan, he had a funny raised scar on the back of his neck. I didn’t know what it was. But when I look at this, you see that part there? I think I was seeing the outline of this part of the chip, under his skin.”

Natasha just stared at the schematics, peripherally aware of Skye’s nervous twitching across the table. “You’re right,” she said at last, flipping through the last of the possibilities one more rime. “But we’re completely unprepared, inequities to deal with it.”

“We don’t really have a choice. You know her timetable. And if I reading this correctly, the chip, for lack of a better word, has already been deployed in over two dozen test subjects. She’s gearing up, and pretty soon it will be game over. Chances are she knows exactly who and what __ is, and if she doesn’t know about me, she’ll figure it out in short order.”

“This isn’t the mission,” Natasha said slowly.

“Well missions change. You’re the infamous Black Widow, you can improvise and handle anything.”

“But I’m not the operative here, you are—”

“But you’re her friend. You have her ear. You have the advantage. She is hunting and exterminating my people. And the ones she doesn’t kill, she’s mutilating, stripping of their autonomy and personality and choice and turning them into her own personal weapons. I _can’t_ walk away from this. I have to stop her.”

Natasha swallowed, harder this time, around the giant immovable lump that seemed to have sprung up in her throat. “Okay. We do this. What do you suggest?”

“I need to find out more about Olya, how she fits into this,” Skye answered. But that, of course, would be easier said than done.

~~~

As soon as they were out of earshot and the suite door was closed, Natasha stormed after Skye, stomping in her frustration as she crossed the room. “What the hell were you thinking?” she asked, grabbing Skye’s shoulder and whirling her around.

Skye regarded her, wide-eyed and confused, for about the three seconds it took to read Natasha’s face, and then she pushed back, expression gone hard and angry. “What was _I_ thinking? What was I _thinking_? How about wow, gee, let me take this relatively low risk opportunity to befriend our target, find out more about her, and oh lookie here, snatch all this intel that takes us most of the way to accomplishing our primary objective!” She twisted her arm out of Natasha’s grasp, expertly breaking her hold and leaving Natasha staring at empty air clasped in her outstretched palm. “What was _I_ thinking? I was doing my job. What were you thinking? You could have gotten yourself killed with that stunt you pulled back there.”

Natasha’s face flushed at the mention of her storming out of tea with Sasha and in on one of Skye’s tete-a-tete’s with Olya. She’d mumbled a hurried apology about nearly forgetting a deadline, and needing Skye’s immediate help, but it had been a slipshod excuse. “I was trying to make sure you didn’t blow your cover. I was trying to stop you from arousing the suspicions of Mr. Fenret. In case you didn’t notice, he’s been watching you. The more time you spend with Olya _alone_ and the more you ask questions, the more attention he pays. You were _this close_ to revealing yourself. Margaritka Kelvinovna wouldn’t know about Olya’s mother, you came dangerously close to blowing the whole op!”

“Excuse me?” Skye asked, mouth opening in a giant “O.” “Olya is an asset, not a mark. Spycraft 101, when feeling out and approaching a potential asset or agent, at some point you have tip your hand. You have to let the asset know who and what you are and give them the option to sign up, or walk away.”

“We’re not trying to _recruit_ , Olya!” Natasha protested.

Skye scoffed, “We’re not? Well that’s news to me, because you remember who this whole op started? My people were disappearing. I was looking for other Inhumans with powers to join S.H.I.E.L.D. to join my team, and Olya was one of them. We need to know if she’s active. We need to know what she can do. And we need her to know she can trust us!”

“You can’t trust _her_. We don’t know what happened to the other Inhumans, and we don’t know what happened to _her_ before we met her. For all we know, Olya could be reporting everything you say, everything you ask to Sasha or Ste–Fenret.”

“Which is true, but still doesn’t change the fact that she’s an asset, and we will need to extract her at some point, not to mention that if you’d paid attention to anything I’d told you, you’d know, Olya doesn’t like Sasha and she is _terrified_ of Fenret. I don’t think she’s informing on anyone.”

“When I came in, you were talking to her, about _you_ within earshot of Mr. Fenret—”

“Because the only time and place Olga Alekseevna and Margaritka Kelvinovna can legitimately spend time together and converse is when we’re both working together, assisting Aleksandra Nikitichna and Natalia Alianovna on their joint projects. If I try to pull her away or get her alone in other circumstances, it’s suspicious.”

(Natasha hadn’t told her about Sasha’s theory that Skye was into Olya. Sasha probably would give them time together to _be intimate_ , Natasha just didn’t want to go there, and she wasn’t sure Sasha wouldn’t send Stent zot chaperone.)

“And I didn’t say anything Margaritka doesn’t know. I only raised issues that _I_ know should have an impact on Olya, if you don’t know there a reason to press, there’s no reason my comments would look suspicious. Everything I said should just appear innocent to the outside world.”

“You could have waited. An opportunity when Mr. Fenret isn’t around,” Natasha pressed crossing her arms.

Skye turned away from her and crossed to the minibar in the corner, opened it, pulled out two mini bottles of vodka and emptied them into a glass, downed it in one swallow. “We’re on a time table.”

“We’ve positively IDed Olya. You’ve confirmed her identity, we just need to extract her—” 

Skye slammed her glass down on the bar, the heavy glass making a dull _clunk_ against the wood’s polished surface, she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “You want to do a blind extraction on a possibly powered individual when we don’t know if she has powers yet, what her powers are, if she knows how to use them, or what her feelings are about them?” The _are you crazy_ remained unsaid, but was visible in every line and ankle of Skye’s body. She regarded Natasha with something that looked an awful lot like contempt. Skye shook her head, bent over, retrieved two more whisky bottles from the minibar, and emptied them into her glass.

“You’re drinking like a Russian,” Natasha observed, voice flat.

“Guess I’m doing something right, then,” Skye shot back, just loud enough for Natasha to hear.

“This isn’t my first rodeo. There are… precautions we can take. I’ve been the welcome wagon before. I did extractions of powered individuals. I know—”

“Congratulations, you talked a willing and in-control Bruce Banner out of hiding with the help of an entire company of heavily armed S.H.I.E.L.D. troops and artillery as backup.” She took a sip of the vodka and set the glass down again. “The Hulk gets pissed off, he takes out a neighborhood, maybe half a city. And you can _talk_ to him. He’s got control, decision-making capabilities. If one of _my_ people gets spooked we could level a _continent_ , and if we don’t know how to control it, there’s no sure way to turn it off short of ICING or killing us. You wanna take that risk? Because I sure as hell don’t.” The table rattled and shook for about two seconds and stopped just as abruptly.

Natasha flinched at the mention of Bruce, then frowned at Skye’s illustration of her point. “This has nothing to do with Bruce. You should have found an excuse to talk to Olya alone. She seems to like you.”

Skye scoffed, “You—you want me to _seduce_ her?” Her voice disbelieving, inflection rising so much she almost squeaked. 

“I wasn’t—if that’s what—” Natasha stammered. She hadn’t seen that coming. She’d been trying so hard to ignore Sasha’s insinuations, it hadn’t occurred to her that it might look like that was what she wanted. It was a logical outcome, a good plan, something she should have _suggested_ if she was doing her job properly, but somehow she had been suggesting it without realizing what she was suggesting, and when confronted with it, she felt, well, poleaxed. 

“Wait, are you _jealous_? Is that what this is about? You don’t want me spending time with Olya, because it makes you jealous? That’s rich coming from you, you know it’s not exactly a picnic watching you with Sasha.”

“What are you talking about?” Natasha asked, fighting against the emotional whiplash. Skye was a professional. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to her what spycraft commonly comprised.

“Sasha _likes_ you. She flirts with you every chance she gets. Little caress on the wrist here, affectionate nickname there. I know you’ve been sleeping with her for the sake of the mission.” She paused, looked Natasha directly in the eye, and cut off anything she could have said, adding, “And I _know_ you had feelings for her before you found out she was Hydra. So that’s gotta be all kinds of uncomfortable for you, but knowing that doesn’t make it any less unpleasant for me to watch.”

“How did you?”

“Clint is chatty when drunk, you know that. Also, it’s written all over your face.” Skye took another sip of the vodka, which had slid precariously close to the edge of the table during her little demonstration of powers. 

“This has nothing to do with me and Sasha. It has to do with you, taking a stupid risk and talking to an asset within earshot of a known enemy. You should have waited. He is _watching_ you. And when he looks at you, it’s like he _knows_ something. We don’t know his role in the operation. We don’t know if he’s involved, how he’s involved—” Natasha protested.

“He’s been staring at me since he got here. If he knows something about me, it isn’t because of anything I said or didn’t say to Olya today.” Skye skewered Natasha with a probing stare, she seemed to be looking through her, searching for something, penetrating Natasha’s usually unflappable façade. “And if we’re talking risk taking, what the hell was that today, you were making up backstory on the spot. It was stupidly risky. You said more than you needed to, and neither one of us has had time to backstop that. If they check your story—”

“This isn’t about me?” Natasha insisted, trying to turn the conversation back on stable ground.

“Oh it’s not? Because of the two of us,” Skye gestured between them, “who is it that broke protocol—”

“Are you implying, I’m out of practice?” Natasha said, realizing her mistake as soon as the words left her mouth.

“I said nothing of the kind. You’re the one that brought that up, but no, I think that’s a convenient excuse for whatever is really going on,” Skye answered turning back to her vodka.

Natasha walked over and took it out of her hand. 

“What?” Skye asked, one eyebrow crooking comically. 

Standing this close, Natasha could feel the heat radiating off her body, could feel the brush of the skin of her hand, cold where it had been chilled by the glass. Skye was strong and solid, the extra three inches she had on Natasha emphasized by her posture and the heeled boots she was wearing; her scent clean and crisp like a desert rain, with no hint of the alcohol she’d just consumed. “I don’t want you getting drunk. We’re still on the clock.”

“We’re spies, Natasha, we’re always on the clock.” Skye reached for the glass again.

Natasha batted her hand away, fingers closing briefly around Skye’s wrist. 

“I can’t get drunk,” Skye said matter-of-factly, “my metabolism doesn’t work that way. And this has nothing to do with being on the clock. You’re afraid of something.”

“You took a stupid risk.”

“I took a calculated risk within the confines of protocol and specifically targeted to elicit an indicative response. Olya took the bait and I was _getting somewhere_ before you barged in there,” Skye countered, sounding a bit like she’d swallowed the old S.H.I.E.L.D. deep cover field ops manual.

“Sasha has thirty-seven chrysalis chips operational and ready for implantation somewhere in Seattle. She has a shipment of two hundred more, waiting to clear customs,” Natasha admitted.

“Fuck!” Skye’s posture deflated, her shoulders rounding forward as she seemed to collapse in on herself. She tried to turn away, but Natasha’s fingers will still around her wrist. “How long have you known?”

“Yesterday,” Natasha admitted. “The shipment came up in the morning negotiations. Sasha asked if I could throw my influence around with customs—”

“And you didn’t tell me?” Skye asked somewhere between disbelief and resignation.

“I didn’t want to alarm you. Didn’t want it to affect your approach of Olya, or make you rush on the data retrieval. It’s—with that kind of volume, it is absolutely imperative we get everything. We can’t—if we miss something one detail, one connection, even if we take out Sasha, they could start over.”

“And you decided that what—I couldn’t be trusted to make rational decisions if I knew there was a looming threat out there? That was intel I needed—it _would_ have affected how I approached Olya, and the fact you interrupted us, right when I was getting somewhere—you don’t trust me,” Skye’s expression fell and she stepped away, pulled her wrist free from Natasha’s loose grasp, only to find herself backed against the wall.

Natasha took a step back. “I trust you. It’s not that. I trust you,” she repeated.

“Well it sure as hell doesn’t look like it,” Skye said, crossing her arms over her chest, hiding her hands, making sure they were securely tucked into her armpits, where they were aimed at no one but herself.

Natasha had seen that move before. It was Skye’s _nothing to see here, I’m harmless, and I swear I won’t hurt you_ knee-jerk reaction to anyone who appeared hostile towards Inhumans or threatened by her powers. To see it aimed at Natasha stung like a slap in the face. “I don’t—I don’t know how Phil did this,” she murmured.

“Well if you’d asked Phil, he would have told you that I don’t do well with secrets, and I work best when I have _all_ the information. When people freeze me out, I tend to go digging, and that can blow up in my face and theirs and have unintended consequences,” she said sounding defeated, and not entirely convinced Natasha _did_ trust her. “Look, I get this was need-to-know information, but I _needed to know_.”

“I know. I’m sorry,” Natasha apologized, which only seemed to confuse Skye more.

“Whatever. It’s done. I’m just going to take a shower—” Skye dismissed, but Natasha was still talking.

“I’m new to this. Not used to being on this side of things. I don’t know how Phil did it all those years. With Cli—” she broke off realizing too late what she had started to say.

But the comparison was not lost on Skye. “Wait, did you just compare you and me to Phil and Clint?”

“I care about you, I don’t want to see you get hurt.”

“News flash, Natasha, I’m a spy. A field agent. I work for S.H.I.E.L.D. and there are several organizations on this planet that have made it their primary objective to hunt down every single member of my species and kill, capture, or experiment on us. I’m always at risk of getting hurt. Someone comes at me, I can throw them through a wall, start an earthquake. I’ll be okay. But you—look I don’t like seeing you go out there with Sasha, alone with no backup. I now you’re Black Widow and you’re totally badass, but I know what these people are capable of, and I don’t like that you could get hurt either.”

“It’s different,” Natasha gritted out.

“Different how? Why did you compare me to Clint? Why not you? Or May, or some other agent Phil cares about?”

“Because Phil wasn’t in love with them!” Natasha exclaimed, only realizing after the words had left her mouth exactly what she’d said.

They stood in absolute silence for what felt like an eternity, but could be counted in the span of a few heart beats. Natasha was acutely aware of every sound, every vibration, every tiny detail—the drop of sweat forming at Skye’s temple, the flicker of her pulse in her neck, the hitch in Natasha’s own breath, the quiet hum of the minibar’s refrigerator, the rush of air from the air conditioner. Every detail emphasized, preserved, seemingly frozen in time.

“Are you saying you’re in love with me?” Skye asked, her voice barely more than a whisper.

Natasha just blinked. She couldn’t look Skye in the eye. Couldn’t turn away. Couldn’t stay. Couldn’t go. She’d broken the number one rule of the business, and sure, yeah, she’d had a complicated relationship with Clint and Phil, she was a genuine friend of Steve and Sam, and there had been other agents over the years who’d gotten in, gotten past her defenses, seen who Natasha really was underneath it all, even when she wasn’t sure herself. But she’d never let herself _fall_ …

Skye’s lips were soft, moist with peppermint-scented lip gloss, and both incredibly sure and cautiously hesitant as they met Natasha’s. They stayed that way for a couple of heartbeats, as if Skye was testing, checking, judging Natasha’s reaction, before her tongue flicked out, seeking entrance. 

Natasha’s mouth opened reflexively, as she found herself falling into the kiss. Her right hand sought out Skye’s wrist again, her fingers closing gently, as if Skye was a fragile porcelain doll that might break if gripped too hard. 

Skye’s right hand fisted in Natasha’s hair, gripping tight and using it to pull them closer together, her left hand snaking down Natasha’s back, caressing as it moved, before sliding her hand into the waist of Natasha’s skirt, and sliding inside, cupping her ass and giving it a nice squeeze.

Their bodies now flush together, Natasha’s tongue chasing Skye’s around and around, breathing her in, her left hand reached up and brushed Skye’s cheek. Her skin was warm and alive and _real_ , convincing Natasha this wasn’t a fantasy, this wasn’t a dream. 

Skye pulled her closer, and Natasha found herself reacting in response, right hand moving to cup Skye’s breast as her left hand fought to free Skye’s shirt from her pants, questing for skin. Skye broke the kiss, and Natasha opened her eyes, leaning into it, chasing Skye’s mouth, but Skye was looking down at her, contemplatively. “Please don’t tell me I read this wrong. I—It’s not just me, right? You were saying, you compared us to Clint and A.C., and I’m in love with you, and you—I wouldn’t risk this if I didn’t feel so—”

It was Natasha’s turn to silence _her_ with a kiss. “Yeah,” she said panting, when she pulled back. “I’m falling in love with you, think I probably already fell, I just don’t—”

“Know how to process it?” Skye supplied, kissing her again.

Natasha nodded.

Skye’s arms move around her, pulling her into an embrace, and spun them so Natasha’s back was pressed to the wall.

“Ungh,” Natasha grunted, letting out a little sigh as her head thudded back against the wall. 

Skye was kissing down her neck now, pausing to nibble at her collar bone, before dropping lower, trailing her lips down Natasha’s chest unbuttoning her blouse as she went, pressing kisses to the insides of Natasha’s breasts. She paused to unbutton Natasha’s suit jacket, and Natasha helped her out, shrugging her shoulders and divesting the offending garment as quickly as possible. 

“Ooh,” she moaned, when Skye flicked her tongue around Natasha’s navel, the sudden moist touch cooling on Natasha’s skin, sending shivers up her spine. 

Then Skye was moving back up again, capturing Natasha’s lips in another kiss as she reached around to unhook Natasha’s bra, eyes locked with Natasha’s seeking permission.

Natasha’s chin bobbed in agreement, and then Skye was off, lifting her bra up, and out of the way, so she could take Natasha’s nipple and breast in her mouth. She started on the left, swirling her tongue around the sensitive flesh, and nibbling gently, then swirling her tongue around and around again before sucking Natasha’s breast into her mouth. Skye’s left hand cupped Natasha’s right breast and squeezed, twisting her nipple just so and sending a spike of pleasure-pain racing up her spine. 

Natasha stood there for a moment, leaning against the wall, utterly surprised and feeling totally debauched, until her brain finally got with the program. Hands questing, she managed to slide them underneath Skye’s untucked shirt, fingernails lightly scratching up her back, she slid her hands around to squeeze Skye’s breasts, found the more convenient front clasp, and focused on twisting it apart one-handed, even as her free hand slid underneath, returning the favor.

Skye pulled off her breast and straightened up, pleasure positively radiating from her as she leaned into Natasha’s touch. “Hmm, may I?” She gave Natasha a coy smile, eyes flicking down towards Natasha’s crotch and back up, meeting Natasha’s gaze with a burning intensity.

“What?” Natasha asked, dumbstruck, not quite tracking.

“Go down on you,” Skye answered, her smile growing even bigger.

Natasha’s brain wasn’t keeping up with the turn of events. “Um, you don’t have to—”

“Oh, but I want to,” she kissed Natasha again, squeezing her nipple and eliciting another gasp. “I’ve been thinking about it practically since the first time I saw you… and since I met you… well, it would be my pleasure.”

“O–oh, okay…” Natasha stammered in reply.

Skye smiled at her, then began tracing a path down Natasha’s body again using her lips and tongue. This time she slid all the way to her knees, pausing to smile up at Natasha while she slid her hands under her skirt and hiked it up around Natasha’s waist. She carefully unfastened Natasha’s concealed thigh holster, setting it and the weapon within aside on the top of the minibar, and then reaching up to slide her fingertips under the waistband of Natasha’s panties, easing them down over her hips and ass, then letting them fall all the way to her knees so Skye could have better access. Skye grinned at her, pressed a chaste kiss to the neatly trimmed ginger hair covering her mound, and looked up at Natasha through her too-long eyelashes. “You really are gorgeous.”

Before Natasha could think of a good response, Skye had parted Natasha’s labia with her thumbs, and was licking intently at her clit, little teasing tastes at first, then sucking, lapping, until soon Natasha was both dripping wet and swollen with arousal. 

Skye’s hair was amazingly soft as Natasha’s hands dropped almost unbidden to tangle in it, fingers massaging, even as she gently nudged Skye more enthusiastically towards her pussy. 

Taking the hint and running with it, Sky set up a frantic pace, switching from licking and sucking at Natasha’s clit, to rubbing it rhythmically with her thumb as she reached her tongue further into Natasha’s cunt, twirling her tongue around and around Natasha’s opening and then thrusting it up inside, letting her tongue go firm and narrow, then flat and broad, drowning Natasha in ever changing sensations, until she was writhing against the wall, panting, and letting out the occasional moan.

Just when Natasha thought she was getting close, Skye pulled back and regarded Natasha with something like utter fascination. All the while her thumb kept up its constant motion across and around Natasha’s clit. Skye seemed to be thinking, but what about, Natasha couldn’t fathom. Before Natasha could pull herself together enough to ask what Skye was thinking, she was moving, once again pressing her mouth to Natasha’s clit, gently sucking and teasing the hypersensitive, hooded flesh with her tongue, as she slipped first one then two fingers of her right hand into Natasha, and began fucking her in earnest. Skye exhibited great skill, her neatly trimmed nails ensuring Natasha’s comfort, as her talented fingers, found the right angle and pace, to bring Natasha right back to the edge. 

It was a thrilling sensation, the contrast of being filled in smooth, long strokes working in counterpoint to the almost frantic flickers of Skye’s tongue on her clit. She found herself getting lost in the feeling, enjoying it, sinking into it, even the part of her mind that usually stayed totally aware, hypervigilant, even, was starting to relax by degrees. She felt flushed and thrilled, and so turned on with every movement. The fact that it was Skye driving her pleasure, taking her in her mouth and driving into her was enough to make Natasha spiral ever closer to coming. But then, _then_ just when she thought it couldn’t get any more intense, she felt it, a strange sensation, like a prefect phantom vibrator pressed against her g-spot, starting out slow, then going faster and faster, until Natasha could feel the desire pooling low in her gut, her inner walls drawing tight, clenching on the phantom caress, her breath coming faster and faster, gasping out in tiny, shallow pants, until finally Skye dove in with a third finger and twisted, just as the vibrations sped up, and she sucked harder on Natasha’s clit.

And just like that, Natasha was coming, a quick rush of juices signaling her release as he muscles spasmed, and endorphins flooded her body and brain. 

“Oh, oh god,” she panted at she started to come down. The vibration was still fluttering inside her, Skye’s tongue slowed to kitten licks. “What was that? What _is_ that?”

Skye just grinned. “I was hoping that would work.”

“Did you—” Natasha broke off to pant, the thrum inside her intensify again, until it was too much, and Natasha found herself cresting again, tripping over the edge into a second orgasm, this one faster than the last, but more intense. She felt positively spent, wrung out. Panting just to catch her breath, she managed “Did you just use your powers on me?” she asked in awe.

“I only use my powers for good, and showing you how I feel about you,” Skye’s fingers slipped free from Natasha’s opening, and she licked them lovingly. “That’s definitely _good_ ,” she added as she rose and leaned in for another kiss, making sure Natasha could taste herself.

~~~

Later, when the endorphin-induced haze of orgasm had mellowed into comfortable post-orgasmic bliss, Natasha found herself in the unfamiliar position of being held. Skye was lying on her back, one elbow tucked behind her head as Natasha lay on her side, snuggled in close to Skye’s curves, her head pillowed on Skye’s chest, Skye’s right arm wrapped tight around her. The silence was comfortable, and Natasha found her fingertips were exploring, mapping out every inch of Skye’s exposed skin.

It took Natasha a few minutes before the specifics of her actions filtered through the pleasant buzz in her mind, and she realized the lines she was tracing back and forth over Skye’s stomach weren’t the subtle whorls of a tattoo, or the hard edges of muscle, or even the jutting profile of ribs—they were _scars_. She opened her eyes and focused on the skin beneath her fingertips, raising her head to get a better look, and blanched when she saw the familiar puckers of bullet wounds crisscrossed and bisected by rows of surgical incisions. The scars were both more subtle and far angrier than Natasha could make sense of—old and faded and glaringly new at the same time. She shuddered to think what could have caused them. They seemed so— But Skye was right here underneath her, holding her, alive and warm, and breathing. 

“What happened?” Natasha asked, the words leaving her lips unbidden. 

“Hmm?” Skye murmured, sounding lost in her own hazy bliss. She cranes her head up to get a better look at what Natasha was talking about. “Oh,” she said sounding both vaguely surprised and bored at the same time, “got shot a couple times, had a lot of surgery.” Her words were almost casual like it was no big deal. A forgotten trifle hardly worth mentioning. 

But something... Natasha looked down at her fingers, at the lines and puckers and pinprick staple marks that marred so much of Skye’s abdomen, anatomy lessons long learned and so often put to brutal, efficient use rushing to the forefront of her mind. These weren’t grazes or ricochets, and there was no way the trajectory could have missed vital organs even if the bullets were slow and didn’t fragment, which was beyond unlikely. And the surgical scars, they told the story of massive, grievous injury, something requiring hours and hours and multiple operations to try to piece back together. Where the scars were, Skye’s entire digestive tract should have been toast. For someone to be alive at all—

“These look fatal,” Natasha said, glancing up and meeting Skye’s gaze. Their eyes locked.

“They were,” Skye said sounding genuinely confused, like she couldn’t figure out how this was news. 

Natasha’s heart skipped a beat and the bottom dropped out of her stomach, the sensation of free fall overtaking her as her face flushed for just a split second before her body went numb, her extremities icy cold. She couldn’t breathe. Loss, shock, fear—for a moment she didn’t trust her grasp on reality. Because that was impossible! She was lying in Skye’s arms, could feel the steady thrum of her pulse and the warmth of her body—Natasha had just made love to her. And yet. The truth of Skye’s death was underneath her fingertips. 

“What—what do you mean?” she asked as Skye said, “You didn’t know?”

Natasha just stared, confused.

Skye’s brow furrowed in confusion only for her eyes to flare wide in anger and surprise before her features smoothed into understanding. “Clint and Phil really didn’t tell you.” 

It was a statement, but Natasha shook her head anyway.

Skye blushed. “I thought they told you everything.” To herself she added, “I guess they really can mind their own business, sure do wish I’d gotten a heads up.”

But Natasha just stared on, trying to reconcile the harsh reality of the scars beneath her fingers with the Skye warm and breathing and smiling... although she wasn’t exactly smiling now. 

“I—I’m sorry. I would never have sprung that on you if I had realized you didn’t know. I—I probably would have called for a time out before you got your hands under my shirt let alone before it came off. Shit... I just—” she was rambling.

“How? If you were dead. How—”

“How am I alive? How did it happen?”

“Both, either?” Natasha found herself asking feeling suddenly wrong-footed. It was her business to know everything about a person. To know about them what they didn’t realize. To sublimated the truth and the lies everyone told themselves and use it all as ammunition, leverage, bait... whenever and wherever the situation called for it. Skye—Skye wasn’t a mark. She was Natasha’s charge. She was Skye’s handler. And it was bad enough Natasha had blurred (crossed) the line that should have provided distance and protection between them, but to realize they’d been out in the field this whole time and Natasha hadn’t known something as important about her agent as she was—had been?—dead—

But before Natasha could internally berate herself, or pull away from Skye, Skye’s free hand was lacing fingers with Natasha’s and pressing firm over the impossible scars. “You know Phil was really dead, right?”

“Yes,” Natasha answered not quite following.

“You know how he’s not dead now. I mean—I assume you were briefed at some point on how Phil was resurrected?” There was a hint of question in the statement, like Skye was going through her own cycle of doubt and self-flagellation.

“Clint told me.” And that was what it was. Her best friend had told her how his husband, who they’d both mourned and who he had been blamed for killing (by some) was now miraculously not dead. It was a story, a plea, it wasn’t a briefing or a dossier. 

When Skye just looked down at Natasha expectantly, Natasha recounted what Clint had told her followed by everything she’d pieced together—gleaned, surmised—in the interim. When she was finished, she found herself feeling more doubtful and confused, but Skye just squeezed her hand tighter.

“I—I wasn’t dead as long as Phil. I mean really, you could argue that I wasn’t _really_ dead, because I kept coding, but Sim—” her breath hitched and she paused, like she wasn’t quite sure whether to say the name or not. “Simmons kept bringing me back, but it was all just... window dressing, borrowed time. She couldn’t get me back that last time, and even if she had, it wouldn’t have lasted. I should have been dead for days at that point. But Jemma, she was so stubborn she just kept finding ways to keep my body just this side of the line.” Skye paused again and looked down at Natasha, giving her a wry smile. “This is just what I’ve been told. I wasn’t there for any of it. I’d been... _gone_ for a while.”

“How?” Natasha started, still feeling uncharacteristically unsure.

“It was an op before S.H.I.E.L.D. fell. We were in the middle of a Hydra mess, playing into their hands only we didn’t know it. Fitz and I were separated from the rest of our team, but trying to complete the mission. Back then, I was still a consultant, and Fitz wasn’t even fully qualified as a field agent. I infiltrated what I thought was the mansion of a billionaire philanthropist type who was playing with his money on the wrong side of the law. Only it was a trap. A set-up by Hydra to try to make Phil lead them to the cure, to show how he’d been resurrected. Hydra wanted to know to enhance their supersoldiers, and Garret was just looking for a way to survive.

“Anyway, I infiltrated the mansion and instead of finding some stolen cargo, I found Mike Peterson being controlled with an eye bomb and got gut-shot twice by the billionaire philanthropist type and left to bleed out alone in a basement.” Skye looked down at her again, held her gaze as she kept talking. “I did. It sucked. It was the most painful thing I’ve ever experienced, and that includes undergoing terregenesis, having my mother try to suck the life out of me, giving myself stress fractures throughout most of my skeleton... you get the picture. I couldn’t get enough air to call for help and by the time Colson found me... I was already long gone.”

“Did you—did you have the side effects? Hypergraphia? Insomnia?” Natasha tried to remember what other horrors Clint had mentioned during their late-night talks while he worried and fretted about Phil, had periodic panic attacks and nightmares about losing him again. Those had been dark days. And she’d feared for Clint, for Phil, actually let herself get angry at the world because it felt like just one more thing on top of what they’d already endured, and it was inconceivably unfair. 

“No,” Skye curled her head up and kissed Natasha’s forehead. “That was actually a clue that helped us get Phil sorted out.”

“And got you turned into...” Natasha finished.

Skye looked down at her, a hint of hardness, the threat of a sharp edge lingering just beneath the surface. “Does it bother you that I’m an Inhuman? That I’m literally not human? Because I don’t think it does, but if I’m wrong and misread the cues, then I’d prefer to know now. I’ve dealt with my fair share of bigots from casual comments to people hell bent on executing me and killing everyone in the universe like me because they thought my species was inherently evil. So before we go any further, I need to know—”

“No,” Natasha interjected, cutting her off. “It’s not—Clint didn’t tell me any of that. I thought— I’ve been so wrapped up in what I thought the job was. The way Phil and even Clint talked about you, I thought... I thought you were someone who needed protecting. I’ve been trying to shelter you from this, because I didn’t want to break you, didn’t want to shatter your world. And I’m starting to realize, my paradigm was all wrong.” She smiled despite herself. “I misread you.” She looked up at Skye, who was looking down at her, awed, and they just stayed that way for a few moments, heartbeats meting out the time as it drifted by, unnoticed.

Skye broke the stillness, shifting them so that they were lying face to face, with Natasha’s hands still pressed against her scars, but repositioned so she could feel the warmth of Skye’s skin, the reassuring beat of her heart. “You did misread me, in a lot of ways, but I’m pretty sure neither one of us misread this—”

“What?” Natasha started, but Skye was kissing her again, and pretty soon, Natasha was lost in the moment, her hands roaming, chasing Skye’s in their exploration of each other’s bodies, until before she knew it, Skye’s hand right hand was between her legs, fingers delving into the slick heat of her arousal, and Natasha was panting hard. She lifted her leg, hooking it over Skye’s arm and hip, wrapping it around her waist so Natasha’s heel was digging into her back, and Skye had much better leverage for sliding two then three fingers inside, massaging Natasha’s clit with her thumb with each thrust. 

Skye didn’t speak, just held her gaze for as long as Natasha could keep her eyes open, though the growing swell of impending orgasm was making it harder and harder to stay with her, not close her eyes and let go, getting lost in the pleasure. Skye pulled Natasha closer with her free hand, running it up Natasha’s back on a slow and gentle journey from the cleft of her ass, up her spine, massaging between her shoulder blades, until she was cupping Natasha’s neck, fingers twined and tangled in her hair, holding her tight. 

Natasha was panting now, shaking as each thrust took her closer and closer to the edge. She was so wet and aroused, she almost didn’t notice when Skye tucked her pinky inside, four fingers tucked together massaging Natasha from the inside out.

Skye captured her mouth in another kiss, her lips wet and bitten, mouth soft, inviting, and growing in its familiarity. 

Closing her eyes at last, Natasha got lost in the moment, feeling, reacting, allowing herself to relax in a way she hadn’t even an hour earlier when she had Skye pressed up against the wall. Skye pulled back from the kiss, and Natasha opened her eyes again. Skye met hers with a question, and Natasha wordlessly said yes.

Skye’s lips quirked into a smile as she gave Natasha’s clit one last affectionate rub, and folded her thumb inside, easing her hand into Natasha until it was buried to the wrist. Just when Natasha thought she couldn’t take another second of the overwhelming sensation of being filled, Skye ducked her head down to Natasha’s breasts and bit down on one nipple _hard_. The electric thrill of pain sent Natasha tumbling over the edge, pleasure coursing through her in waves as she clamped down on Skye’s hand.

~~~

The next morning, everything was different, and yet nothing had changed. Skye and Natasha were _in love_. They’d both acknowledged it out loud and cemented the reality with three more rounds of lovemaking. Natasha could still turn off the part of her brain that wanted to spiral into worry about friends and teammates on missions, but even when she did, she couldn’t quite block that constant ache of worry about _Skye_. She needed her to be okay. She needed them both to get through this.

She’d seen what happened to Clint when Phil _didn’t_ get through it. She knew the risks when she started to fall. Now she just had to hope that she and Skye were strong enough to live with the consequences.

“I found out Olya’s power,” Skye murmured, over breakfast.

“What?” Natasha asked, thrown and confused.

“When you walked in yesterday—it wasn’t—I saw Olya use her telekinesis. She’s fully transformed, out of transition.”

“Are you just assuming this, or?”

“We talked, after I saw her. I vibrated a glass of water for her.”

“And you weren’t overheard?”

“You’re right that Mr. Fenret or Wolfgang Stentz or whatever his name is, seems way too interested in me. But he’s under orders from Sasha to leave us alone when we’re… flirting. I figured it out last week, about the same time I figured out Olya speaks Mandarin and Fenret doesn’t.”

“When did you find out—”

“About Olya’s powers? Yesterday morning. Which is why I hadn’t had a chance to tell you, since you were… indisposed with Sasha. What you walked in on was a coded pep talk. Olya is _terrified_ and now that I know that we’re on a timetable, we have to Act. That chip, the one I saw at the lab, when Olya took me to Chrysalis? That’s _her_ chip. Sasha promised it to her.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, back up, what do you mean her chip?”

So Skye explained what she’d learned, how she’d figured out _why_ Olya was so terrified of Chrysalis and Mr. Fenret. Why she was so subservient around Sasha. “While S.H.I.E.L.D. was busy with my mom, Olya, stumbled into what Sasha was doing. It was an accident. She went to Russia trying to find out more about her dad’s family; her dad had been an electrical engineer, and he had worked for VolkoSoft. Of course, what she didn’t know, was that Hydra had a file on her dad, and when she showed up sniffing around, they locked onto her. 

“Reinhart had the diviner, well Gunderson had a terrigen crystal and he liked to experiment with it. So, when Sasha found out the daughter of a known Inhuman interning in her HR department, she called in a favor, and got Gunderson to send over the crystal. She even staged a lab accident to expose Olya and covered up the three humans that died to make it possible.

“She’s had Olya ever since. She was out of sight while she transitioned, but once she was stable, Sasha brought her on as her personal assistant. See, she tried the old fashioned indoctrination on Olya, and it didn’t work, but Olya was scared enough that it didn’t make much difference. She’s been promising Olya that she’d use chrysalis on her. That there was a chip out there specially for her, that would set her free, and make her what she was _supposed to be_ , take away free will, yadda, yadda, I think Loki would have been proud. Only Sasha promised to chip her last…or at last of the test batch. See, apparently they tried earlier versions of the chips out a few years ago, and they killed two Inhumans and a human they used as test subjects. So, Sasha has been testing, and the latest chips that arrive are from the final batch. Sasha’s going to use them for a _demonstration_ and Olya’s gonna get the last one.”

“So when you said you needed to know that information—”

“I meant I needed to know, because once the last 200 clear customs, Olya is as good as dead. We saw what an earlier version of the chip did to Tan. We have no idea if we can rescue anyone who has already been implanted. Sasha is _killing_ my people and turning them into monsters. This has to stop now.”

“There’s an inspection, Sasha talked about it. It’s happening tomorrow. That gives us enough time to call S.H.I.E.L.D., get them to send reinforcements. I don’t care if we get spotted, we just have to make sure we _contain_ that facility.”

“Why the inspection?”

“She’s planning to implant more chips. Dr. Gunderson’s going to be there and Stentz too. I think everyone who’s currently in the know is going to put in a show, because there implanting, 36 of the chips.” And now, with Skye’s revelations, that number made a _lot_ more sense. They’ll be celebrating. If I keep her distracted and you make sure Olya is ready to run, our backup can break into the lab and the confinement wing, get the chips and research. Can you and Olya come up with an excuse to get access to their internal network?”

“Yes,” Skye replied, and smiling, “and I know just the worm to do the trick, make sure we get all the information and they get nothing.”

“That just leaves the actual surgery patient or patients… I think we can convince Phil to hit the place with knockout gas. As long as we excuse ourselves quickly, S.H.I.E.L.D. can clear the other prisoners and then come in after us and clean up. Rescue anyone in the OR, restrain the captives, or however Phil wants to handle them.”

“Do we have enough time?”

“You really should have told me last night,” Natasha shot back, without any heat.

“Well, you should have told me two days ago, and last night we had other things on our mind,” Skye replied.

Natasha kissed her. “I think if we move now, we have enough time.”

~~~

The headache that greeted Natasha when she came to was all too familiar. Splitting, throbbing, it could only mean one of two things: she was concussed courtesy of a bad blow to the head, or she’d been gassed. Judging by the position she found herself in, twisted, head laying on the hard granite floor, tasted of feet and shit in her mouth, she was going to go with both.

She stayed quiet, assessing her body and surroundings as quickly as she could while fighting back the nausea that threatened to overwhelm her.

She was restrained, but not very thoroughly, just a quick zip tie around her wrists and some duct tape around her ankles. She couldn’t see very much of the room she was in because it was dimly lit and windowless and she seemed to be shoved in a corner or alcove between the corner of two walls and some sort of utility shelving unit. Cautious, she began to ease herself to a sitting position. If she could get at least partially upright, she could use the hard edge of the zip tie to saw at the tape around her ankles. That plus pulling, kicking out with her feet should get at least her legs free in short order.

She’d made it about a quarter of the way to sitting, when an overwhelming _pressure_ , almost a noise, but more like static on the brain, seemed to wash over her, freezing her where she was, paralyzed utterly unable to move, barely able to keep breathing.

“Oh Alianovna, how I wish you’d been different,” Sasha’s voice came suddenly from somewhere behind or above her.

Natasha cringed at the familiarity of Sasha’s address. Her reaction proof positive that she’d let Sasha in more than she was willing to admit. If Sasha was just some target, Natasha wouldn’t have cared if the target had bad manners and didn’t exactly display stunning respect the adversary. But Sasha had been a friend, had almost been more, and her decision to _take_ that intimacy and _twist_ it, use it to undermine and berate Natasha, stuck like a sour lump in her throat. 

The world tilted, stuttered, and there was pain in Natasha’s head again. A few moments later, she realized she’d fallen back over, landing on the floor on her back, skull connecting painfully with the ground once again. She blinked and Sasha was standing over her, something flashing in her ears, something else familiar held in one hand.

“I figured the fabled Tony Stark would have invented a countermeasure for these by now,” she waved the remote in front of Natasha’s face. “After all, Hydra managed to steal his heart with these. And you are supposed to be his friend, but does he give you countermeasures? No. So I wonder why that is?”

Natasha was actually pretty sure Tony hadn’t touched countermeasures for the sonic device because his flashbacks surrounding that incident were so severe even the mention of it cause sever panic attacks that had him tripping towards respiratory arrest even _now_ , years later and even after undergoing experimental heart surgery and synthetic bone grafts that enabled him to live without the arc reactor. Still, she couldn’t quite suppress the pang of annoyance that Tony hadn’t sicced someone else on the project when it became clear he couldn’t—and probably would never be able to—work on it. 

She focused on breathing, trying to make her chest raise and fall with each gasp, and used the pain to focus her resolve.

“Your former fuck toy, Barton—now, rumor is he is immune to this,” Sasha continued, laughing lightly. “He cost several of my colleagues their lives when they tried to trap him. Before those stories came out, I had no idea he was… defective. I must say, I admire that he managed to turn such a disability to his advantage. Fortuitous. Still, I knew these would work on you. You do not have the same sort of… luck as Barton. And you are far too vain to ever consider something as irrevocable and irregular as deafening yourself to protect you from a weapon.”

Natasha wasn’t going to touch that one. Sasha could rant and gripe all she wanted. It didn’t make a difference to Natasha in the end. She couldn’t speak, and debating _anything_ with Sasha would get her nowhere, so no matter how offensive or reprehensible or distracting Sasha was, or not matter how many errors there were in Sasha’s little diatribe, Natasha couldn’t let it distract her. Natasha just had to keep her breathing under control, ignore the pain that would inevitably replace the numbness that suffused her entire body, and come up with a plan, figure out how to use her environment to her advantage.

No sooner had she completed that thought, when she found her environment changing. Sasha was leaning over her and _pulling_. She reached out to open a door Natasha had overlooked, and hauled Natasha by her shoulder through it and into a different room. Only the room wasn’t really a room, but more of an airlock or vestibule. As soon as the door thudded shut behind them, another was automatically opening before them.

The sight that greeted them on the other side sent adrenaline coursing through Natasha’s veins.

The room was dark—floor, walls, and ceiling an identical glossy obsidian. Almost the only light came from recessed canisters set in the ceiling five meters above outfitted with full-spectrum bulbs that cast everything in a warm and opulent glow that belied the sinister mood the floor and walls. The one exception was at the far end of the room’s long rectangle, where a series of spot lights shown, each carefully angled to focus on a particular spot to set the stage and leave no inch of the scene poorly illuminated.

The focus of this presentation was a surgical bed frame, shaped and sized roughly like a grown adult, and currently angled mostly vertical so it was clear to anyone within visual range. Strapped to it, was Skye, groggy, but wide-eyed and terrified. She was intubated, so she couldn’t speak, a ventilator breathing for her, forcing each mechanical rise and fall of her chest. Her hands and arms were strapped to the bed’s arm plates, wrapped in some sort of high tech compression gloves that were strangely familiar. The arm plates themselves had been raised out away from the rest of the bed and were pointing forward into the room, towards Natasha. Skye’s legs were also restrained, strapped to the legs of the bed frame, with three thick bands each. The restraints also looked familiar, something made out a metal-reinforced carbon fiber, if Natasha recalled correctly. A complex IV had been run through a central line in Skye’s chest, and wireless electrodes for monitoring devices were connected all over her body.

But worst, and most shocking of all, was the familiar outline of the chrysalis chip implanted at the base of Skye’s skull. “No…” Natasha felt herself involuntarily mouth the word, hardly more than a breath as her eyes took in the sight. If what she was seeing was real, she had to have been out for a long time, probably hours. But she didn’t know if she could trust her eyes, didn’t _want_ to believe. 

But the terror in Skye’s eyes was all she needed to know, to _feel_ what she was seeing was real. Skye, her beautiful Margaritka, who had kept her cool and maintained cover when her boyfriend turned out to be a Hydra mole, who had stood up to her long lost mother to protect the very humans who had tried to label and imprison her, who had flawlessly bluffed her way through an entire dinner party, in Russian, with an incriminating SD card tucked up her sleeve, and had gotten through all that without ever cracking or showing fear to her enemy, was positively terrified. She was staring at Natasha in horror, eyes begging, unblinking, and Natasha realized…

At that moment, Sasha came up behind her, and yanked her by the left elbow, kicking at Natasha’s feet so that she was forced upright more or less onto her knees, ankles still firmly duct taped together, hands zip-tied behind her back. Her head throbbed and the room swam, but the image before her eyes didn’t change. Skye was still there, looking absolutely terrified. And that’s when Natasha realized that Skye wasn’t afraid for herself, she was scared for _Natasha_.

“You will forgive me if I am blunt, but I have never thought kindly on those who waste time gloating to their enemies,” Sasha began, standing somewhere behind Natasha where she couldn’t see what Sasha was doing. “If my only purpose was to kill you, I would simply break your neck while you are restrained, incapacitated by the sonic emitters, and still too weak from the gas to put up a fight. Or I would send the command to the new weapon to have it kill you.” As she spoke, Sasha’s right hand gripped the back of Natasha’s neck and _squeezed_ , long, manicured nails digging in and drawing blood, fingers compressing pressure points and pinching nerves hard enough that a debilitating spasm of pain shot formed at the junction of Natasha’s neck and left shoulder, and shot down her left arm, hand immediately flaring with pain, then going numb. “But my purpose,” Sasha continued, “is not _just_ to kill you. I must first give you a choice.”

Natasha met Skye’s unblinking, pain-filled eyes, and sent as much solidarity, reassurance, and love to her as she possibly could.

“We have known about Inhumans far longer than your precious S.H.I.E.L.D.,” Sasha continued, dropping Natasha back on her heels and walking away. She started to pace slowly, her stilettos making a rhythmic tapping noise against the floor, voice echoing in the cavernous space. “I know you have been, _out of it_ for a while, but surely you have heard of the late Daniel Whitehall, formerly Werner Reinhardt, and his obsession with Margaritka Ivanovna’s mother. Ever since his discovery, shortly after Ivanovna’s birth, those loyal to the cause both within the ranks of S.H.I.E.L.D. and affiliates of Hydra around the world began investigating the phenomenon. In particular, they recruited heavily from Department X, because of our successes with the Winter Soldier.” Sasha stopped her pacing and walked steadily toward Natasha, interposing herself between Natasha and Skye, forcing them to break eye contact. 

Natasha kept her eyes steady, focused on where she knew Skye to be.

Sasha’s talon-like fingers, gripped Natasha under the chin, and squeezed, forcing Natasha to turn up her face. “You have met the Winter Soldier,” she stooped and jabbed a finger from her free hand into the scar from the Winter Soldier’s bullet hidden where it was beneath Natasha’s shirt. “Met him at the height of his utility before his programming was corrupted. You also know who he used to be—friend of your friend Captain Rogers, no? So you understand how _effective_ we can be. Hydra knew this, and they employed it to their advantage. 

“So, we searched for information about this mystery woman, discovered there were others like her, albeit with different… _powers_. We hunted down legends, dug for clues, until we stumbled onto a myth about an ancient and powerful alien race known as the Kree. The blue aliens who fell from the sky and changed man, building a legion of secret warriors to do their bidding. Only time passed, and the Kree fell into internal conflict, with many opposing the existence of their other faction’s creations, and here on earth, the warriors rose up and lashed out against their masters. Millennia passed but their descendants remained and retained the information about how to unlock their genetic potential, the alien legacy hidden in their blood.” Sasha released Natasha with a rough shake, almost knocking her over, and resumed her slow and steady pacing.

The effects of the sonic emitters were wearing off, slowly, but between the pinched nerve and the lingering effects of the gas, Natasha was weak and uncoordinated. She only stayed upright because Sasha didn’t _quite_ knock her over. She still couldn’t move much, and she was for all intents and purposes trussed up like a turkey on display.

“Whitehall was obsessed with his precious obelisk, the diviner,” Sasha continued, “and the secrets and power it contained. He was an idiot, yes, but a product of his upbringing. After all he was a devoted Nazi, and anything that amounted to a test to determine if someone belonged to the master race… he ate it up, couldn’t resist. 

“But the rest of us… The rest of us were far more interested in the others out there and their abilities. Especially when we realized so many of them were _scared_ of what they could do, _struggled_ to control themselves and wield their talents outside the tutelage of a select few. I’m sure you’ve heard the story that Margaritka was special, one of the first in generations to transform and emerge from her chrysalis on her own, the old-fashioned way, without the careful control and guidance of her dear mother and her council of elders.” Sasha turned a piercing glare on Natasha. “That would be lies. Or, maybe just arrogance. It is entirely possible that is what Jiaying actually believed. But the truth of the matter was that the Earth is a very big place. And the Kree left souvenirs all over the place, just waiting to fall into the right hands. And time and time again, it happened. Archeological digs, mining, war zones… in this day and age there are _so very many_ opportunities for those with the Inhuman genetic legacy to stumble into the right path. So we looked and searched, patiently, and began collecting those we found. 

“We didn’t know how to _activate_ them at that point, so we just captured the ones who had already turned. And we experimented, looking for ways to _weaponize_ them. After all, that was their intended purpose, an army of living weapons their masters could turn on the unsuspecting human populace to ensure victory. Only, we refused to make the same mistakes as the Kree, we knew we needed some manner to _control_ them, remove the uncertainty of individual loyalty and motivation, and give control of the weapon to our scientists, our _commanders_. That was my mission. A mission to which Department X was uniquely suited given our past success with the winter soldier. We combined what we already knew with data and expertise developed by John Garret’s Deathlock project and drew from Whitehall’s own experiments in unlocking the secrets of Jiaying’s blood for his own benefit. Of course it was your S.H.I.E.L.D., after it rose from the ashes that provided the most help, well that and Whitehall’s obsession with the diviner at the end, a certain crystal fell into our hands and that proved to be _very_ useful, but I digress. Your S.H.I.E.L.D., had so many ideas! So many brilliant minds working and creating new technology, new solutions, like those brilliant compression gloves that work with Margaritka’s bioelectrical impulses to help suppress her abilities. It was the answer to refining what we had been working on for so many years!

“A little experimentation, a little more research, and we figured out how to turn suppression into amplification, learned how to adapt the same concept for a variety of special skills, and now with the help of the chrysalis chip, we gain full control over the weapon, full domain over their powers. There is no need for the soldiers to learn to control their abilities themselves, each unit’s powers are in the complete control of their masters. We can turn them off or on, point them at any target, no cooperation from the weapon necessary. Better yet, we have now mastered the process so the basic surgery can be completed in a matter of hours.” 

Clicking footfalls echoed away from Natasha, and she realized through the haze of pain from the gas and concussion, the lingering sonic paralysis, and the burning pain in her neck, that Sasha was walking away, crossing the long room towards Skye, who was still strapped unmoving, unblinking to the table. 

“The result is beautiful, don’t you think?” Sasha asked, stroking Skye’s cheek with her hand. “We implant he chrysalis chip in the brainstem making additional mechanical connections as needed depending on the individual unit’s powers and brain physiology. The chip,” she ran her hand along the side of Skye’s neck, “also operates as a sort of kill switch in the event a unit somehow manages to resist its programming. Placement in the brainstem ensures a quick, easy, and effective death.” Her tone was proud, boastful, and Natasha realized Sasha sounded more like a proud salesperson showing off the features of their new tech than a person talking about the torture and murder of another sentient being. 

“Ah, but the best part,” she continued, laughing a little, “is our testing program. See, we knew we could not afford to get this part wrong. If we had incomplete control, or if the weapon unit’s abilities did not work as expected, we could not exactly allow the unit free range and autonomy necessary to act as a weapon. They might be understandably upset and could turn against us before their programming was complete. So when surgery is concluded, we wean of the sedation, but keep the paralytic in full effect. The unit cannot speak, cannot move, cannot _breathe_ without our assistance,” she patted the ventilator tubing running into Skye’s mouth. “And we make sure they are supplied with a steady stream of drugs and whatever else we might need to administer, for as long as we need to.” Sasha tapped Skye’s chest next to the central line. 

“At first, we tried testing our control of their powers with the units still unconscious, but it turns out that led to inconsistent results. Some units, like Margaritka, here, seem to have near full use of their ability even when unconscious, in others we simply could not stimulate the necessary neural pathways and biochemical reactions to complete our testing. Of course, keeping the unit paralyzed, but conscious presents an excellent opportunity to induce reprogramming, further ensuring the unit’s compliance, obedience, and loyalty, while removing complications found in less restrictive training regimes.”

A momentary spike of dread shot up Natasha’s spine and passed just as quickly, Skye was looking at her, her eyes were expressive even if they couldn’t really move. She was _there_ ; she was still _Skye_. If she wasn’t, Natasha would know. 

“It’s not reprogrammed yet,” Sasha added laughing. “That would defeat the purpose.”

“So this little exercise has a purpose?” Natasha blurted, speaking around the pain. “Because it really sounds like you just like to hear yourself talk.” Feeling was returning to her left arm, and with it renewed opportunity. She managed to shift her arms behind her back, breathing through the dagger of pain caused by moving her left arm, and the kitten-weak, agonizing pins and needles left over from the gas and sonics, and leaned back just a little, until the zip tie around her wrists was leaning on the duct tape around her ankles. She concentrated on wiggling her toes, testing, and inched her toes up, flexing her feet to put the tape at a better angle and began to saw, tiny strokes of zip tie over duct tape, movements just small enough to not reveal her to Sasha and not cause Natasha to lose her balance, the most she could do with what little motion and strength she had regained. 

Sasha didn’t seem to notice Natasha’s minuscule movements. Instead she just smiled. “This is a sales pitch, and I am about to offer you a choice.” She stepped away from Skye and walked toward Natasha.

Natasha froze, not wanting to reveal her escape attempt and uncertain what Sasha was doing.

But Sasha stopped roughly halfway between Skye and Natasha and held out her left hand, silvery metal glinting in the reflective, obsidian room. 

Natasha squinted and leaned forward; the outline of the thing in Sasha’s hand looked familiar. It took her a moment to place it, but she eventually did. It was one of the “monitors” Sasha had presented to the biotech firm as an offer of the technology they would have at their disposal if they accepted VolkoSoft’s buyout and merger offer. She was willing to guess it wasn’t actually a “monitor.”

“This control,” Sasha provided conveniently, turning the device into the light so Natasha could better see it, “connects to the chrysalis chip. This is our joy stick, our safety protocol, our trigger, our remote control, all rolled into one. If I press the right sequence of buttons, the unit’s terrakinetic abilities will activate causing vibrations in whatever matter it is pointed at. I can keep the setting low, causing minor tremors or if aimed at a living subject, perhaps mild discomfort. Turn the setting up, and the unit will shake apart the city, cause the water molecules in a body to vibrate so fast it microwaves from within, or just simply vibrate someone apart.”

“And how, exactly, are you going to do that. She’s paralyzed. You said so yourself. How is she going to make anything vibrate if she can’t move?” Natasha asked, stalling for time.

“The unit’s muscles are paralyzed. Its terrakinesis is not a function of muscular action. The bioelectric nerve impulses that control terrakinesis and other powers exhibited by the inhuman subjects operate on a frequency and through bodily functions that are not disrupted by the paralytic,” Sasha supplied.

“This unit’s testing has just begun,” she continued, “so I do not yet know where its limits are, at what point will I overtax it, causing it, perhaps, to shut down? I need to experiment. And here is where the proposal comes in. 

“I like you Natalia Alianovna, my… affection for you, is _genuine_. You may not remember me, but I remember you, when you were small. In the Red Room. Before I graduated, you used to watch me, especially in ballet. I knew, looking at you, that you were like me, you were fascinated by the female form, you craved to touch and be touched by other women. It drew me to you. I felt a sort of… kinship, for I knew that like me you would have extra challenges to face. You would have to work to suppress that part of you, cast it aside in order to do your duty, avoid forming attachments with your fellow sisters, not give in to the weakness and draw of familiarity when you and your sisters graduated and were cast out into the world to fulfill your mission.”

The mention of ballet and being small, watching, sent Natasha’s mind back to those years that haunted her dreams that she did her best to forget. She could see it now. Sasha, younger, much younger. Probably 14 and nearing graduation, Natasha herself, maybe seven or eight, sitting on the floor of the Red Room’s ballet studio, posture perfect, eyes attentive, watching the older girls run through their barre exercises. Sasha had always been called Aleksandra by Madam B, and she had the longest lines in her arabesque the most fluid motion through pliés and tendu. She had been a role model, someone little Natalia admired, and hoped to be like when she was older, better trained. 

“I worried for you,” Sasha continued, “and I was so proud when I learned the name and reputation you had made for yourself when you were still so young. By the time you were 15 they were already calling you the Black Widow, you had left a trail of bodies across Europe, Asia, and the Americas, and your loyalty to the Red Room was without question.

“Then S.H.I.E.L.D. sent Barton to assassinate you, and instead you changed sides. All those years of perfection, perfect loyalty to the cause, devotion to your craft, and you threw them away. Why?”

Silence fell on the strange, obsidian room, and for several dozen heartbeats no one spoke. Natasha, who had resumed slowly sawing the duct tape with the zip tie, pulling her feet apart, slowly, realized Sasha was expecting an answer. So many reasons. So sad that Sasha apparently couldn’t see, wouldn’t even dare speculate.

“If you have to ask, you wouldn’t understand. Also, it’s none of your business,” Natasha answered with a little grunt as the tape on her feet started to give.

“Were you just afraid of death? I never took you for a coward. Now you will get to show me who you really are, if you were really worth all the effort the Red Room spent on training you, if you were worthy of the praise Madam B heaped on you.”

_Oh god, was this all based on some kind of jealousy?_

“The choice is simple,” Sasha continued. “You can prove your worth, show your loyalty to the human race, to the Earth, and join me in the fight against our enemies. Stop fighting, hand over your intel on S.H.I.E.L.D.’s current operations with regard to project Caterpillar, and join me in testing this weapon. When we are done establishing its baseline, it will undergo programming to ensure it is receptive to our commands. You can then join me in testing our next subject. My pathetic assistant who I assume you were trying to recruit.”

“Why would I do that?” Natasha asked.

Sasha raised the device, pressed a button, and Natasha felt intents discomfort in her left ribs. It felt like her chest was shaking, the bone vibrating. With each passing second, it hurt more to breathe. She realized, looking at Skye’s body trussed up on the table, that Skye’s right hand was pointed, _aimed_ directly at Natasha’s ribs.

“Because if you do not,” Sasha answered at last, “I will use this to force your lover to kill you. I will make it as long and painful as possible. I will stretch out your death, play with the settings,” she wiggled the remote, “until your organs have begun to liquefy and your bones are dust, and you cannot speak, but still make wretched gasping noises as if to plea for mercy. But I will not stop until you are utterly destroyed. And then I will continue testing this unit, your lover, and I will ensure she keeps the memory of killing you, destroying you, for as long as possible. Then my technicians will reprogram her mind, ensure _its_ loyalty to us. We will find out all the information she has to know about S.H.I.E.L.D., not just the Caterpillar agents and targets, but everyone, from your precious fuck toy Barton to your old mentor Coulson. And you will die knowing that when I am done, I will turn this unit on each and every person you care about. You and your selfish arrogance will be responsible for causing the excruciating death of everyone you love.”

Sasha pressed the remote again, and the pain in Natasha’s ribs intensified. The table holding Skye turned slowly so both hands were aimed at Natasha—Skye’s right was still pointed at Natasha’s left ribs, while her right was aimed squarely at Natasha’s right arm. The sensation of vibrating apart from the inside grew, and it became harder and harder to breathe. Natasha let out an involuntary gasp of pain when one of her ribs cracked. She could feel the pressure building just below her right elbow, if this continued much longer her radius would fracture and then more ribs and then...

Suddenly the pain and pressure stopped. Natasha found herself panting with the sudden relief.

“So what is it going to be? Will you honor your training? Prove your worth? Build on our friendship?”

“Friendship?” Natasha spat. She gathered herself, training kicking in and overriding the physical pain and emotional shock. “You think we have a friendship? Any hope of being my friend _died_ when I found out you were Department X and working for Hydra. 

“And why would I ever show loyalty to you? Or your cause? You see, unlike you, I never needed Madam B’s praise as validation. Somewhere along the way, I figured out who I was, who I am. And I don’t need you or anyone else to give me orders.”

“Perhaps the fear of death will make you regret? One last chance to change your mind. Once I press this button, your fate is sealed.”

“Пошёл в жо́пу.”

“So be it.” 

The vibrations in Natasha’s side and arm, began anew, only this time they were easily five times as strong and getting stronger. She felt two more ribs crack and she began to feel strangely warm inside, too hot.

Her feet were almost free, but her body was still too numb and weak to move out of the way, and Sasha was watching her. When Natasha started to list to the left, the table turned and followed her. 

“Don’t beat yourself up about this. I know this isn’t you. I forgive you,” Natasha murmured for Skye’s benefit, the pain too intense to continue speaking. She felt the bones in her forearm start to crack under the strain as her abdomen began to feel very strange. “Я люблю тебя, Риточка.”

She was falling now, slumping listing to the side, her body falling in a twisted lump. Tape wrapping her ankles finally tore free, but it didn’t matter, she could no longer move. This wasn’t how she expected to go out, especially not after she had _retired_ from spying, not while babysitting an agent as a favor to Clint, not knowing her death was being used to destroy someone she loved. But it was getting hard to think through the pain and odd vibrations. Strangely though, it felt like maybe the vibrations were slowing, becoming less intense. Or maybe that was just her losing the ability to feel. She could see Sasha continue to punch in commands on the remote, undoubtedly sending the vibration intensity higher and higher.

But as the seconds stretched into minutes, and Natasha was in agony, but not crying out, and still, well, breathing, Sasha’s earnest, relaxed, button pushing turned a bit more violent. She jabbed at the control in apparent frustration, but nothing seemed to happen.

Then, suddenly, the pain and vibrations stopped. Natasha slumped on the glossy black floor, shaking with relief, but unable to do anything more than breathe. The position was putting pressure on her multiple rib fractures, but she didn’t care. It felt better than before. Her feet were free, but her hands were still tied. But while the pain was intense, she realized that she could _move_. The effects of the gas and the sonic emitters must have been wearing off.

Sasha stalked towards the table and Skye, fingers jabbing at the controls the entire way. 

With her back turned, Natasha tucked her feet up, and twisted her body so her legs slipped through her bound hands. Then it was just a matter of dislocating the thumb on her left hand (easier said than done when her right arm was fractured and providing much pain, but little leverage) and managed to twist her hand out of the restraints, the zip tie giving way with a tiny _pop_.

Unfortunately for Natasha, Sasha seemed to notice and turned, eyes wide, free hand reaching back to her holster to draw the small I.C.E.R. that was holstered there.

Natasha pushed off into a roll, dodging out of the way as best she could, but as she moved Sasha went _flying_ forward. Literally lifted off her feet and flung past Natasha into the far wall, where she hit so hard the stone paneling cracked, and she dropped to the ground.

 _What the fuck?_

_Skye_! 

Adrenaline surged through Natasha, and she sprang into action, crossing the 20 meters or so between them in seconds, pain and injuries forgotten, buried. “Skye, Skye!” she repeated, “Can you hear me?”

But Skye was still unmoving, unblinking. Her chest rising and falling in time to the mechanical thrum of the ventilator. The other monitoring devices, though, were squealing, and blinking. And Natasha knew that even if those machines were not hooked up to anything outside this clean room, it was only a matter of time (and a short matter) of that before they had company, because Sasha’s impact with the wall had made _noise_ , and even if that didn’t carry outside the room, the _door_ was dented outwards, breaking the electronics and the protective seal to the rest of the airlock. There was no way that would go unnoticed.

“Shit, shit, shit. Skye, stay with me, please, please Ritochka. Hang on,” she pleaded, the diminutive for “Daisy” slipping out of its own accord, as she struggled to make sense of the lines and leads and actually _help_ , Skye. The paralytic agent was still being fed to her through the central line. As long as that was flowing, Skye couldn’t move or breathe on her own, and they wouldn’t be getting anywhere. Apparently, somehow, Skye had regained control over her terrakinesis, but how and for how long? If she could do that again, there was a chance Skye could take out any pursuers, blast them, throw them out of the way, but at what cost? How hurt was Skye? Would that make her worse? And they still wouldn’t be able to move. Natasha had no clue where in the building they _were_ precisely, and as much as she needed to ensure she and Skye were not captured, it also wouldn’t do anyone any good if they blew the building sky high or set off a massive earthquake.

Worse, if what Sasha had said was true, there were other Inhumans in the building, including Olya, and many of them were currently incapacitated, controlled, possibly brainwashed or being tortured. Those people were Skye’s mission, her _people_. Abandoning them, or killing them, even as an act of mercy, was unacceptable. It would break Skye (or it _should_ , if she wasn’t such a damn good agent), regardless it would _change_ her. And it would make Natasha into the monster Sasha seemed to want her to be. Years ago, when she’d made the decision to take Clint up on his offer, when she’d followed him, gone straight, decided to change sides, be a good guy, she’d made a promise, a commitment to stop being the problem, stop _destroying_ people on other people’s whims. There _had_ to be another way, because that was unacceptable. And the fallout—if they survived, the U.S. Government would round up, convict, and execute Natasha in a heartbeat. High profile aristocratic socialite status be damned! She could think of at least 5 senators, a couple dozen congress people, and three cabinet secretaries off the top of her head, who would like nothing more than to have Natasha prove them right, that she and people like her were too dangerous, too destructive for society. Too dangerous. And Skye, well, if she survived, they’d use her, study her, dissect her. She wasn’t human, and they knew that. If she was lucky, someone like General Ross would experiment on her, weaponize her (again), kill her when that didn’t work, and if she was unlucky… well there were plenty of leaks to Hydra and their allies throughout the government.

So, Natasha had to act and think, and think _fast_. She followed the IV back to Skye’s chest and disconnected it with a yank, a murmured apology in its wake. At least it was no longer being pumped through Skye’s veins, the question was, now what? They had to wait, but how long? Natasha had no idea what drug they were using, what would keep Skye alert and aware while also being completely paralyzed. Natasha had a fair amount of medical-related training—some thanks to the Red Room and their torture and interrogation techniques—more courtesy of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s advanced field medic program. But she couldn’t help but feel woefully inadequate for what Skye needed. Every drug she could think of that might work that way, was slow, too slow, taking maybe a half an hour or more to wear off. If they were _exceedingly lucky_ they would have minutes. She found herself wishing for a doctor, wishing even that _Bruce_ was here, and the pang of his loss hit her like a fist to the gut. One more reminder of everything she’d lost everything that had been taken away.

“Hang in there,” she murmured, as she began moving around the table, trying to make sense of the monitors. “Just hang in there, I’m working on a plan.”

But of course, Skye couldn’t respond. 

Natasha was pretty sure one of the displays was reporting on the status of the chrysalis chip. And if she was reading the information correctly, it was reporting a catastrophic systems failure. Which, okay, explained why Skye had been able to fight back, but not _why_ there was a systems failure, or what had happened to the chip, or what that meant for Skye.

She was moving onto the next display when a _whoosh_ and _bang_ reverberated behind her, and the entire _room_ shook.

She whirled around, to see Sasha’s body moved. It was almost a meter farther from the door, and now obviously bloody and very, very dead. In her haste, Natasha had failed to check Sasha’s body, failed to make sure she was incapacitated. Correcting her mistake, she rushed over to Sasha’s side, retrieved the dropped I.C.E.R., and patted down her body, looking for anything else that might help. She pocketed the remote, an ID badge, a key fob, and a cell phone. Shoving those into what little pockets she had, in what amounted to casual attire, she rushed back across the room to Skye. “I’m sorry. I am so, sorry. Thank you,” she breathed.

But Skye was _moving_? Or at least her right hand was twitching, fingers moving. It took Natasha a minute to realize she was fingerspelling something that looked like “breathing tube.”

Eyes wide in realization, Natasha locked gazes with Skye, “Are you sure? If I pull this, and your diaphragm’s still paralyzed, I can’t—there’s no way. I don’t have anything for manual ventilation,” as she spoke, her eyes darted around the medical theater, hoping to find something to prove her wrong, but there was nothing. “And I’m not sure I can get you to the floor, perform rescue breathing without hurting us both worse.”

“Yes,” Skye signed, her hand moving more. Then she spelled “T-r-u-s-t m-e.” 

Against her better judgment, Natasha did as Skye asked, disconnecting the ventilator and extubating in quick succession.

For about 30 seconds she was sure it had been a mistake. Skye wasn’t breathing. Her chest wasn’t moving, and her eyes were looking more and more distressed with every passing second. If she’d just killed Skye, if that was what this was, a request for a way out, a way not to die in captivity, suffer and cause harm at the hands of people who saw her as less than human, then Natasha could respect that, but she’d hate herself. Never forgive herself. She’d misunderstood. She should have fought harder. She—

But at that moment, 29 and a half seconds later, Skye coughed. Not a _real_ cough, just a little puff of air, followed quickly by an inhale. It wasn’t very deep and it looked extremely painful, but Skye _was_ breathing.

“Thank you,” she whispered, mouthing the words more than speaking. 

“Shh, shh,” Natasha hushed, moving closer to Skye, and caressing her cheek, the movement soft, loving, in stark contrast to the same motion Sasha had made just minutes before. 

“Get me down,” Skye whispered. “Be careful—careful of my neck.”

“Are you sure you should move?” Natasha asked, almost rhetorically.

“I absolutely shouldn’t, but no time.”

So Natasha set about freeing Skye’s arms, and legs, saving her torso for last, and carefully supporting her head and neck as she lowered Skye to the floor. She had no idea what kind of damage the chip could have done to Skye’s spine, now clue how invasive the surgery had been. She could have used a backboard or at least a C collar, but there was none to be found.

Arranging Skye’s limbs carefully, she found her hand straying to the chip.

Just as her fingers touched it, Skye’s hand shot out, weak and uncoordinated, and slapped her own. “Don’t,” was Skye’s reply.

“The chip—the machine said the chip malfunctioned. That’s how you were able to overcome it. Strike Sasha.”

“I know. I broke it,” Sky murmured.

“What?”

“Stupid bitch, knew how to turn it on and off. Not _control_ —” Skye broke off into harsh gasps, coughing.

Natasha looked around frantically for water, ice chips, anything to soothe what must have been an incredibly sore and scratchy throat, but there was nothing.

“She turned it on; I turned it _inward_. Suppressed enough of it to keep from killing you and destroyed the chip, or at least the chip’s connections to my brain.”

“What?” Natasha asked, disbelieving, frantic hands questing for proof, straying again towards the offending chip, but Skye just bumped her hands out of the way again.

“Stress fractures.” She pointed at one of the “amplifying” sleeves Sasha had forced on her. Poked, poked again.

Natasha got the message and carefully pulled them back, rolling them down Skye’s arms and off her hands, revealing mottled red-purple bruising in their wake.

“Internalizing causes stress fractures. I focused on the chip. Bone around it is full of fractures.”

A chill ran through her. Natasha’s hands stilled. Skye had broken her own neck to free herself from the implant. Panic threatened to spike again, as Natasha realized they were now even _more_ screwed than they were before. Skye still had a chip, nonfunctioning, but still there, possibly in contact or proximity to her brain stem. They were probably a minute from being swarmed by building security, and Skye had a broken neck. Nothing displaced—at least she could still move—but with no back board or C collar in sight and an ever diminishing opportunity to escape, Natasha didn’t really see how they were going to get out. 

“Don’t panic. I’ll be alright. I can risk moving when I get muscle strength back, but not before. If I have muscular control of my neck, I can stabilize myself enough to get out of here. Just, uh, forgive me if I leave the heavy lifting and the hand-to-hand combat to you. I’ll happily blast anyone I can out of our way. But, well, yeah. Sorry about your ribs and your arm.”

Floored with the selflessness of Skye’s statement, Natasha found herself bending down, and kissing Skye on the lips. It started out as an innocent, “thank you” kiss, but soon deepened, as Skye’s mouth opened beneath her, chasing Natasha’s taste. A second stretched into seconds, and then almost a minute, when Skye’s hand, squeezing Natasha’s injured arm, finally broke them apart. 

“Thanks,” Skye said, smiling. Her voice was stronger now and her breathing deeper and more steady. “I needed that.”

Her words were punctuated with a _thud_ from the direction of the outer airlock door, that made Natasha jump.

She whipped around, but still could not see anything beyond the buckled shape of Sasha’s body.

“Think they’re onto us?” Skye quipped.

Natasha let out a week laugh.

It didn’t take long to figure out Hydra forces were breaking down the outer airlock door, trying to get into the lab. 

“We gotta go, back door, into the restraint wing, free as many people as we can then run,” Skye said.

“You can’t—”

“I’m stable enough, getting stronger every minute. Besides, I’ve had worse,” she added with a rueful smile.

Natasha just let out a bitter groan, thinking back to—was it only two days ago?—when Skye had told her about dying. She supposed it was true. Didn’t mean she had to like it. So, Natasha helped Skye up, carefully, gently.

“Oh my god, you’re in uniform,” she realized.  
“Well, I was wearing it under my suit, I mean the jacket hid the widow’s bite okay, only,” she pressed against the tender spot at the back of her head. “I seem to have lost the suit about the same time I got clocked.”

“Well that will come in handy,” Skye mused.

The door clanged louder, the metal visibly buckling now.

“Hey, so in all your studying of this facility and chats with Olya, did you happen to see another way out?” Natasha asked.

“Back door, to the restraint wing,” she said, taking a few shaky steps. Only she was walking towards Sasha’s body.

“Where are you going?” Natasha asked in alarm, as the entire wall groaned and bent.

“We need Sasha’s keycard,” Skye explained.

“Well let me get it,” Natasha said, suiting action to words, and jogging across the room to Sasha’s broken, twisted body. She paused to kick the remote away, make sure it was gone and broken, before unclipping the card from Sasha’s lapel.

The next half hour passed in a blur. Natasha stood lookout, armed with her widows’ bite and an ICER that was rapidly running out of cartridges while Skye logged into what seemed like every computer terminal she could find, hacking in, uploading a worm, corrupting files, downloading data to a spare hard drive she had actually cannibalized from one of the lab’s computers. Thanks to the blueprints Skye already had studied, and the schematics they were able to study online, they quickly found their way back to the restraint wing, where they discovered two dozen Inhumans, including Olya, who are in various states of reprogramming. All but Olya had been fitted with the chrysalis chip.

“Oh thank god, you’re alive,” Olya said. “But she gave you the chip,” she added sadly, seeing the scar on Skye’s neck.

“It’s deactivated. And we’re out of time. Where _is_ everyone else?” Skye asked. “I saw the records. There were over 150 people here. Everyone taken who hadn’t died, was here. Where—” 

“They moved last night,” Olya explained, even as Skye was running around, approaching everyone who was responsive and triaging the captives. “Aleksandra Nikitichna said they were a present to Hydra’s director.” Skye seemed to physically flinch at that reference. “That he would need them and the chips that just cleared customs. Aleksandra Nikitichna said there would be 24 and me, and she would keep the other 12 chips in reserve. Only—I think she used one of them in you, how are you—”

“I broke it,” Skye said, coldly turning to the rest of the room. “Okay, listen up, everyone who is still responsive, I can deactivate your chips. I’m terrakinetic. That means I can control vibrations, force fields, waves, tectonics, you get the idea. I’m going to do for you, what I did to myself, only much more safely. I can deliver a targeted vibration at the chip and sever the connections between it and your brain. There is some risk, but I promise, I am very, very good. You’ll be safe. We’ll still have to take the chip out later, but for now, you won’t have to worry about anyone hijacking or controlling you. I will only do this if you consent.” All 19 people raised their hands. “I’m Skye, by the way, you can also call me Daisy or Margaritka.” She went from person to person, for lack of a better term, zapping their chips.

“Now for the rest of you, I am sorry. You’ve been reprogrammed and you’re not exactly in a position to consent. So, I am going to ask those of you who are mobile and in control of your faculties, to guide them out of here. Follow Natasha here—”

Natasha waved.

“And we’ll get doctors to help you out as soon as we’re out of here. _Good_ doctors,” she said. “One of them is like us. He controls electricity and he’s awesome.”

The former captives seemed encouraged by this news.

“Where are the chips?” Skye asked.

“In there,” Olya answered, pointing to an innocuous-looking glass-doored cabinet.

Skye shot Natasha a meaningful glance.

“Destroy them all,” Natasha whispered. They had the schematics. They had the data, and there were now deactivated chips in people’s heads. There was no way she was letting an intact chip survive. Not after seeing what it had done. The scientists would just have to turn to the alternatives for their analysis.

Skye didn’t hesitate, and within 30 seconds, the cabinet was reduced to dust.

They were just about to leave when suddenly the five reprogrammed Inhumans, turned as one and screamed. Three launched themselves at Skye, Natasha, and Olya, while the other two ran to the wall and set off the alarm. 

“Oh fuck,” Natasha said, even as she ducked and dodged a willowy woman with brown hair, who was currently charging at her with crazed determination. 

“Someone’s activated them!” Olya screamed.

But Skye was already acting. After narrowly dodging the first attack, she shot blasts—one, two, three, four, five, at each of their assailants, and they were on the ground within seconds.

“Did you deactivate their chips?” Natasha asked.

“Can’t risk it, even if they _could_ say ‘yes,’” Skye shared grimly. “I have no idea what that would do to them, how _exactly_ their brains are altered or wired—I just rendered them unconscious. They’ll have horrible headaches when they wake up, but at least this way, we can get them out of here.

“Okay, people, we’ve gotta move. Break into groups of three, three of you to one of them, get them mobile, keep them from the guards. You last four, you’re our sentries. Watch our backs. Alert me if anyone approaches. Olya, you’re with Natasha, lead the way out of here. Find us the fastest, safest route to the side exit in the ally. I’ll blast anyone who comes at us. Natasha’s hurt, but she’s well enough to fight anyone who gets in close. The rest of you, stay safe. If you have control of your powers and they would help, use them, but please don’t do anything that will get us hurt or stuck. Okay?” Skye asked.

Murmurs of assent echoed around the room, and within a minute they were off.

They almost made it. The guards came at them at every turn, on every floor, but Skye pushed them back, threw them clear. Olya managed to throw a few more out of the way, or open doors to trip them. The farther they went, the more Skye had to fight, but adrenaline had overridden the pain, and she wasn’t even aware of the fractures in her arm or her broken ribs. 

They were so close to the exit, when all hell broke loose.

~~~

It was terrifying in a way Natasha had never experienced. She’d been shot, stabbed, electrocuted, paled, fell off a cliff, tumbled out of a building, and survived more than her fair share of car, plane, and helicopter crashes—and once, a train derailment, although the train car was only traveling 5 miles an hour at the time, so she didn’t really count that. She’d been hurt. She’d been through rehab. She’d lost a couple of charges. Had seen comrades fall in battle, and kept on going. She’d even spent hours stuck in the waiting room waiting to find out if her friends or loved ones would be okay. But none of those experiences prepared her for this.

Nothing could have prepared her for the cold, leaden paralysis and gnawing dread that had been growing inside her, consuming the world around her everywhere she turned. Because it was _Skye_ on that gurney, Skye who wasn’t breathing, whose heart wasn’t beating.

The scene kept playing over and over again in her mind. Stentz came up behind Skye, while she was occupied with two armed VolkoSoft guards and trying to avoid shattering her already-battered skeleton. Skye had managed to point one hand at Stentz and hit him with a terrakinetic shock wave that knocked him off his feet and sent him tumbling out of sight around the corner of the stairwell. He’d thudded to the floor and Skye had gone right back to focusing on the two goons doing their darnedest to break her.

Natasha had been barely aware of the fight, she was doing her best to draw as many of the hired thugs and uniformed guards from Skye and the newly freed Inhumans as she could. Everyone Skye knocked back, or sent flying out of the way who wasn’t killed or incapacitated on impact swarmed up on Natasha.

Natasha, for one, had never been more grateful that Aleksandra’s job of disarming her had been hasty and sloppy. Natasha would have killed for even one of her trusty 9mms, but as it was, she was relieved to have her widow’s bite built into her uniform where Sasha had completely failed to disarm it. The guns wouldn’t have done much good anyway, not while fighting in a crowded, cramped stairwell with two dozen or so wounded, terrified, tortured civilians who needed to stay firmly out of the crossfire.

Natasha’s world narrowed down to kick, swing, shock, kick, throw, stomp, block, punch, punch, grab, shock, kick, shock, duck, roll, block, squeeze, swing, shock… and over and over again until she was lost in the familiar rhythm of fighting. The bloodied, wailing thugs were at a distinct disadvantage. They couldn’t dare risk using their weapons in the stairwell because there were just so _many_ of them, the risk of hitting a fellow thug was just too great. But Natasha had no such concern. The widow’s bite wasn’t a projectile weapon, so her cost-benefit analysis was different. Instead she found herself in a target-rich environment with plenty of goons to send flying down the stairs after one another.

Natasha would never forget the exact moment something twigged in the periphery of her awareness, telling her the scenario was somehow wrong. She grabbed the arm and shoulder of the thug nearest to her and swung him in a circle, knocking over his compatriots and sending them tumbling down the stairs. It had the added benefit of turning Natasha towards where the sudden sense of _wrong_ had come from. 

Skye was directing energy waves at both of the particularly tenacious soldiers she’d been tangling with and was trying to call out something to Natasha—it was about the people they’d freed—it had seemed so important at the time. Then Stentz rounded the corner, seeming to materialize out of the shadows despite the harsh, unyielding florescent light of the stairwell. He didn’t speak. He didn’t shoot. He didn’t take a swing. He just raised his foot and shifted his balance and then, taking advantage of Skye’s momentary preoccupation and positioning, to aim a perfectly placed kick at the back of her neck. It happened so fast, Natasha didn’t have time to speak, and his foot connected with a resounding _smack_ and _snap_ even as shock turned to horror on Natasha’s face.

As quickly as it had happened, it was over, and Skye was dropping to the ground like a marionette with her strings cut, the terrakinetic waves emanating from her hands, cutting off suddenly, sending the two thugs struggling against them, falling flat on their faces on the landing.

Natasha wasn’t really sure what happened after that. They were still five floors up. Too much distance, too many stairs between their group and the possibility of freedom. Natasha felt a blow land on her back, but it barely registered. She thought she might have screamed, a great big “Noooooo!” or something similarly appropriate and tragic, but she wasn’t sure. All she knew was Skye was not breathing, and based on the condition of her spine and the placement of the kick, Stentz had almost certainly broken her neck.

Natasha felt the impact of the various thugs, striking out at her. The ricochet of a handgun shot. There was pain, and the smell of blood, but it was all distant, alien. There were people in her way. People trying to stop her from getting to Skye and from getting Skye and their charges _out of the building._ She tried not to think about how little time Skye had without breathing. It was almost a minute before she could reach Skye’s side. Almost a minute to realize Skye didn’t have a pulse. How much time could she have? Could she be saved?

Time moved in fits and starts. It passed in a blur and jumped around. She’d screamed. A _lot_. She’d grabbed two of the guard’s guns, and had just started shooting, center mass, anything to stop them from coming at her.

At some point, Olya had come to her, helped her move Skye, using her telekinesis. It was crazy. Olya was untested and traumatized, but it worked and with their immediate area cleared, and Natasha taking point, she’d managed to lead their group down the stairs to the first floor. A hundred feet down the hall to the exit, and more guards stood in her way, this time more effectively armored. She’d swung and slid, and wailed on them. Beating and shoving and kicking and pushing them out of the way. Relentless in her pursuit desperate for freedom, determined not to lose the love she’d so recently gained.

At some point S.H.I.E.L.D. had showed up joined by the U.S. Army and more cops than Natasha had seen at one time, even during her encounter with the Winter Soldier. The doors bursting open behind the armored guards she was fighting. It had taken Natasha far too long to recognize them as friendly. And longer after that for her to make sense of what was going on.

And now she found herself in the back of S.H.I.E.L.D’s medically equipped Quinjet with Skye, Lance Hunter, Mack, and some guy named Lincoln, who was apparently an actual medical doctor and an Inhuman to boot (as well as a friend of Skye’s). Bobbi was flying, and Olya was sitting there shell-shocked. She’d come with them because her telekinesis was still the safest way to move Skye. 

Natasha was dimly aware that the other chrysalis patients were not there and some of them were in bad shape, but Lance had assured her three or four times that they were being looked after, there was another medical Quinjet landed on a neighboring roof and even more S.H.I.E.L.D. personnel on the way.

Skye was strapped to a backboard now, and Lincoln and Mack were talking back and forth. She caught snippets—tachycardic, fibrillation, spinal shock—and sagged with relief when Lincoln announced they’d established an airway and were able to get her hooked up to the onboard ventilator. But all that did was shift Natasha’s worry from the immediate to ten minutes in the future. How badly was Skye hurt? Was it permanent? Would she live? The longer they flew, the more Natasha’s mind kept circling back to those questions again, and again, and aga—

“Hey.” 

Natasha jumped. For the first time in her active memory she was so immersed she’d completely lost sense of her situational awareness. She started to panic, but Mack’s steadying hand on her shoulder kept her in check.

“Do we—how is—” Natasha tried, but she couldn’t form a complete sentence.

“Skye’s strong. And I know it may not seem like it, but she’s survived worse than this. Just ask Fitz.”

A nervous laugh, somewhere between a hysterical chuckle and a sob escaped Natasha’s lips. “What do we know,” she managed.

“She has a spinal injury, we know that,” Mack started again, holding up his hand to forestall Natasha’s interruptions. “We know, because of how her body’s reacting. We don’t know how bad yet. But this is Skye. She heals far faster than a human and Lincoln has techniques that can help Inhumans heal even faster, better, and more than any human can. Skye’s mother could regenerate—she was actually vivisected and put back together and she _lived_. Now Skye’s powers aren’t the same, but she may have inherited some of those traits at least to a limited degree. There’s also the GH325—”

“The what?” Natasha stammered.

“It’s the name of the Kree-derived drug that brought Phil and Skye back from the dead,” Mack explained with a shudder. “According to Fitz and to Simmons’ notes, it’s still in her blood, and may still be able to regenerate damaged tissue. Add to that we know she can heal stress fractures very quickly, and this may just be temporary. A speedbump until she can heal enough for the swelling to go down and the spinal shock to dissipate. Now, we’re going to try to do a portable MRI while we’re en route, but it may not show us that much because there’s so much microtrauma to Skye’s skeleton from her efforts fighting off and destroying the chrysalis chip. And then there’s the chip itself. It has some metal components, so and there’s a small possibility the chip parts may move under the MRI’s magnetic field. So first, we’re going to try to remove the chip fragments. It’s going to take a while, and you just need to hang on.”

“Can I hold her hand?” Natasha asked, surprising even herself.

“Yeah,” Mack agreed.

Skye’s limp hand was the one point of comfort for Natasha on the seemingly interminable transcontinental flight. Even traveling Mach 2 it took far too long to get back to S.H.I.E.L.D. HQ.

~~~

“How’re you holding up?” Phil asked, sitting down next to Natasha in the observation room outside the OR at S.H.I.E.L.D.

Natasha scoffed, she tried to form words, but before she realized what was happening, she was crying. Leaning against Phil and sobbing.

He didn’t say anything just rubbed her back with his flesh hand and let her get it out.

“I don’t know how you do it,” she observed and hour later, when Skye was out of surgery and they were waiting for Lincoln and the human surgeon to come talk to them.

“Sometimes, neither do I,” Phil whispered, honestly. “It’s… terrifying letting go, allowing yourself to love someone to join yourself with them. It’s scary enough for normal people, but in this line of work.” He shook his head. “But it’s something you do. Because you have to. You love someone and you can’t take it back or turn it off. It just _is_ and accepting that love, enriches your life, it makes _you_ a better person. So even when you lose and you’re in pain, it’s still worth it.”

“You just have to keep going and don’t be afraid to ask a friend for help,” Clint added, sitting down on her other side.

“Thanks,” Natasha croaked, turning a tear-stained smile towards Clint. “And this is me asking for help, by the way.”

Clint squeezed her shoulder. “We got that.”

The doctors came out a few minutes later, and Natasha found herself holding her breath.

“There’s a lot of swelling,” Lincoln started saying. “And the less said about the state of her C1 vertebrae the better, but her spinal cord and the surrounding nerve roots are intact. We had to remove a few bone chips, but with S.H.I.E.L.D.’s technology, I think we’re going to be able to get her to heal without resorting to fusion or halo implementation. When she recovers, she should be able to breathe and move on her own.”

“How long,” Natasha asked.

The other doctor opened her mouth, but Lincoln cut her off. “We don’t know. We’re keeping Skye in an induced coma, because we need to make sure she doesn’t accidentally react with terrakinesis. She’s stressed and afraid, and under these circumstances, she probably won’t have much control. It’s instinctive, but it could get her hurt. We’re already seeing some signs of regeneration—I’m not sure if it’s something she got from her mother, or the GH325, but either way, it looks like she’s going to be better a lot _faster_. Maybe a week or two before we can bring her out the coma and maybe wean her off the vent. A month maybe to get movement back—but that’s just a guess. I mean we’ve never had a case like this. She could need more surgery, there could be complications, or the regeneration could speed up and she could be back on her feet in days. We don’t know. But right now, we’re optimistic she’ll make a full recovery.

Natasha let out a long sigh, exhaustion sweeping in as fast as relief. “Oh, ooow,” she winced as the movement jarred her ribs. 

“And now it’s time to get you some medical attention,” Phil said, prodding Natasha out of her seat and towards the waiting doctors.

~~~

**2 Weeks Later**

“Hey,” Skye said, drawing Natasha out of her doze.

Skye’s voice was still scratchy, but the smile on her face more than made up for it.

“Hey yourself,” Natasha replied. “Hey, I—sorry, did I fall asleep?” 

“Just for a little while,” Skye answered, making Natasha groan. “Actually I just got back from the last round of tests and, ta-da!” She moved her right arm, and after some false starts managed to wave her hand around, reach out, and squeeze Natasha’s fingers.”

“Wow,” Natasha said, genuinely impressed. Yesterday Skye hadn’t had any control of her hands. 

“At this rate I’ll be out of bed in a week.”

“Don’t rush it,” Natasha chastised, leaning in to kiss Skye’s forehead. “Your neck is still healing. Miraculous superhuman regeneration or not.”

“It’s _Inhuman_ and that’s not the point,” Skye countered, “the point is, hey look at me, I’m holding your hand. And I have a question.”

“A question?”

“So, I know you originally came out here for a single assignment, helping me out. And now things have kind of gone sideways—”

“What I said in Seattle? I meant all of it,” Natasha answered. “I’m not leaving. My life—it’s flexible enough for me to fit into yours, and right now, you need me, and I need you and Phil and Clint, and… I want to find out what happens next.”

“You know I was in PT with Bobbi this morning, and she said Hunter has a lead on Grant’s whereabouts,” Skye said hopefully.

“When you’re better, we’ll hunt him down together. Free the Inhumans he has captive. Stop him from ever doing it again.”

Skye squeezed her hand back. “Sounds like a plan.”

~~~

**Epilogue:**

Romanova Natasha Alianovna. She was a weapon. Then an assassin. Then a spy. And then the world changed out from underneath her. 

Now, she really wasn’t the detached, unaffected, everything for everyone agent she had been before, but she hasn’t lost those skills or lost that part of herself, she had grown, changed, metamorphosed into something more. And while maybe she can no longer be the totally clandestine secret agent that spikes fear into the hearts of everyone who hears her name, she can’t entirely leave that world, not while there are people who need protecting, and innocent lives that can be saved from the same horrors that were inflicted upon her. 

And if that means she stays Natasha Romanoff, part-time socialite, part-time Avenger, part-time security and infiltration consultant for S.H.I.E.L.D., and full-time badass girlfriend to an even more badass super-powered secret agent, then that’s all right with her.

The End?

**Author's Note:**

> Here's what you need to know:
> 
> This story takes place more or less in modern day, and is close to the MCU, but differs in several key ways.
> 
> 1) Clint and Phil were married before Phil's death during the battle of New York.  
> 2) Natasha had a casual triad relationship with Phil and Clint both.  
> 3) Clint was persona non grata at S.H.I.E.L.D. after his encounter with Loki's scepter.  
> 4) Clint was on the run and nearly killed following the events of Captain America: The Winter Soldier  
> 5) After blowing all her covers in the course of dumping S.H.I.E.L.D.'s secrets on the internet, Natasha returned to Russia to try to discover more about her own past and identity beyond the lies and half-truths the Red Room told her. She has been living a semi-high profile life as a socialite of sorts in St. Petersburg, helping out Steve, Sam, and Clint as needed.  
> 6) Iron Man 3 and Avengers: AOU still happened more or less, but Stark didn't lose the arc reactor and obviously Clint and Laura are not married with kids. Laura is just a friend much like Audrey was just a friend of Phil's.  
> 7) Clint has been with the new S.H.I.E.L.D. (and Phil) for the last year or so (a little more)  
> 8) S.H.I.E.L.D.'s Playground base is located under the Gobi Desert.
> 
> And since most of this story was written before AOS season 3 began airing, the current events of this universe diverge from those of AOS (although there are some striking similarities that I swear are a total coincidence.


End file.
